Self Studying Computer Security

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

The world of computer security can be large and often intimidating. For those wanting to learn about security, it can often be hard to decide where to start, and what topics are important to understand. Through my experiences, I hope to help guide others on pathways to study security.

There are a number of different pathways and topics that you can choose to study. For the purpose of this article, I will be providing information on getting the base security knowledge. From here, you will have a knowledge that will allow you to better understand what is available in security, and be able to pursuit the areas that interest you most.

Computer Programming

I highly recommend that anyone looking to learn security starts by learning programming. So much of computer security relies on a solid programming background, so it is important to have a solid foundation before attempting to build off it.

In terms of languages, there are a few recommendations that will help in security:

1. C: In general, languages that work at a system level are very useful for understanding how systems work. Exploits such as buffer overflows are very common in languages like C, so exposure to the language will help you understand these exploits later on
2. HTML and Javascript: A large amount of…