Hi Guys,
I'm a newb interested in learning some programming. Care to make any suggestions on what languages to learn? I'm particularly interested in the security side of programming as well as the web dev side. Preferably, I'd like stuff with a gradual learning curve, so I'm not discouraged right off the bat.

Thanks
mark

Welcome to the forums, Marko. From an PM I sent earlier:

There are only a few languages worth learning these days for webappsec. .NET (if you want to do Microsoft programming), Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Everything else is sort of dying unless you are talking about low level languages. All of those languages are doing better than ever. So it depends on what sorts of languages you are interested in (fast dev/prototyping or slow dev/enterprise production software).

I focused on the prototyping languages primarily (PERL, PHP, etc...) because they are quicker to test applications with, although I often have to delve into the other languages during penetration tests. Having a good working knowledge of all of them can't hurt.

- RSnake
Gotta love it. http://ha.ckers.org

How can you forget Python? :P

nEUrOO -- http://rgaucher.info -- http://twitter.com/rgaucher

Hahah... at first I thought you were serious, but then I saw your little face there, and I realized no one uses Python (except Google, but maybe that is the exception that proves the rule).

Well, I was first kidding because for the web it's not well developed... but still, if you want to develop concepts, tools etc. this is the BFG! (well, at least for me).

nEUrOO -- http://rgaucher.info -- http://twitter.com/rgaucher

Umm.. id actually likes using python..

but I would actually suggest starting with C, and if you can figure it out, then do C++ to confuse the living crap out of you..

Anyway, C is now considered today's Assembly language.. meaning that it's what most languages are based on.. cept those object oriented languages.. those bastards!

--thrill

rsnake Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hahah... at first I thought you were serious, but
> then I saw your little face there, and I realized
> no one uses Python (except Google, but maybe that
> is the exception that proves the rule).

I use Python. :(
But only for really tiny tools I rarely use. Lol.

- Kyran

also assembly could be an alternative... gives some size+speed boost... if your going to create bruteforcing tools ... and C/C++ and perl... this my opinion...

in webdevelopment I recommend PHP (that is what I thing everybody recomends)...

p.s.welcome

Ugh Ruby on Rails... if you can learn BASIC, you can learn Ruby on Rails. But it's the future of scripting languges, more and more scripter friendly, and less secure.

I'm into PHP and probably stay there for a while. I started with ASP and Perl though. C is really interesting, while you do it you see how closely related it is to scripting languages like PHP and JavaScript.

I woudn't bother to even even look into MS program/scripting languages, sure you can do it, for me it was a waste of time.