Learn how to program.This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners.
Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very
powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have
written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are
available at the Python web site; there's an excellent third-party one at Computer Science
Circles.I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but
this
critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of
Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker
cannot, as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving
like a plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the
components actually do. Now I think it is
probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.There is perhaps a more general point here. If a language does too
much for you, it may be simultaneously a good tool for production and
a bad one for learning. It's not only languages that have this
problem; web application frameworks like RubyOnRails, CakePHP, Django
may make it too easy to reach a superficial sort of understanding that
will leave you without resources when you have to tackle a hard
problem, or even just debug the solution to an easy one.If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C,
the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you
know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language
is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually,
the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will
be.C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's
resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to
do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand.
All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up
huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as
powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it's smarter
to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but
your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.Other languages of particular importance to hackers include
Perl and LISP. Perl is worth
learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web
pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl
you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I
suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that
don't require C's machine efficiency. You will need to be able
to understand their code.LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the
profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get
it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of
your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can
get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and
modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu
plugins for the GIMP.)It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java,
Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages,
they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will
educate you in valuable ways.But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or
even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you
need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general
way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need
to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by
relating what's in the manual to what you already know. This means
you should learn several very different languages.I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program
here — it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and
courses won't do it — many, maybe most of the best
hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of
knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge
into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship.
What will do it is (a) reading code and (b)
writing code.Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the
co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an
excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in
Ten Years. His "recipe for programming success" is worth
careful attention.Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language.
The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the
form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little
more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your
writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in
your models.I have had more to say about this learning process in
How To Learn Hacking. It's a
simple set of instructions, but not an easy one.Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few
large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and
tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software,
programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are
now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic...
links:https://www.zhihu.com/question/49294784/answer/116311732