..I need to write a program that accesses a web site (like a hotel website), logs in, and checks for availability during a certain day...and if it finds that date not available, I want the program to keep checking the website several times a day and if/when it finally finds that date to be available I want the program to send me an email to alert me.
You can probably do that in java(pretty sure for http, not so sure for https). It would require scanning/parsing the HTML to find the form, creating a response to the action item in the form, reading/parsing the HTML response and continuing until you find what you're looking for. If the responses could vary from day to day, this could involve a lot of code to test for all the possiblities and combinations. Could be tough programming for a beginner.
The sending of email would be the easy part.