I haven't done this myself (not enough experience) but I saw a similar idea discussed years ago - for an experienced programmer learning a new language, reimplement something you have already written in the new language. Supposedly, the fact that you had written the first application shows that you understand the problem domain, so you can concentrate on the new language.
Yup, just try it, make the board and how to check if someone won or if it's full, figure out how to get input from the user. Then if you like the language move to implementing a simple ai (start with randomly putting pieces ;p).
By then you should know a good chunk (IO, loops, built in data structures ...)
I have never done any graphics at all. All I know is bash and some awk and perl, mostly for text processing. I keep planning to learn more, which is why I read about it a bit, and browse HN, but I have too many other things I want to do too.
o | o | o
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x | x | x
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o | o | o
That (if HN doesn't mangle it) should be a fully working Tic-Tac-Toe board. You can store it as a string, hashtable, whatever you want. You could label the squares 1-9 for the prompt asking the user where to move.
This is all doable with perl and a command line. Try it out, see what you learn.
My first implementation (in c++) was exactly like that. A 3x3 array that printed out like that. You had to enter 1,1 for the left upper corner (that's how I learned that arrays start at 0 in almost all languages ;p)
