So, my goal is to get into the cyber security business, but I need a place to start. I took a couple khan academy lessons in javascript when I was like, 7, but I keep hearing about multiple others, like c++. What I’m trying to ask is what language should I start with?
@Denki_Kaminari If you have little experience, maybe starting a business is a bit to aspirational - maybe learn some first and then come up with some ideas.
In my opinion, in regards to cybersecurity, you should start learning about websites, web servers, etc. That would include things like node (with servers packages like Express, etc.), PHP, etc. Not coding languages, but maybe also look into some servers/proxies like NGINX, Apache, etc.
Hope this helps and good luck!
Eddie
My friend who’s been in cybersecurity for a while has his CISSP.
It might help to look at what’s required for a cert like this; there are others listed on that site.
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@EddiesTech I think they mean they want to get into the business, not start one necessarily!
@Denki_Kaminari Cyber security is not my lane, but it’s super important work and I follow a lot of really smart folks online who are professionals in that space! I posted this tweet to solicit some starting points for you, I’d keep an eye out there and even seek forums related to the topic.
Cybersecurity involves much more than just programming, and even if you’re considering the programming side, I think it’s more useful to think about your goals and specific roles, rather than specific programming languages 
Here’s a book our CISO recently published:
Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path: 9781119833420: Computer Science Books @ Amazon.com
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Cybersecurity isn’t all about learning a coding language, a lot of it is understanding concepts, knowing how to use your OS of choice (most often Linux, but can be BSD or Windows), and knowing how attackers and intruders think.
I’d recommend you explore and find out what interests you. Cybersecurity is super broad, you can do anything from catching hackers on the dark web to beefing up the computer system of a large company.
If I had to recommend a language, I’d suggest Python and Go. Both are very easy to learn and have thousands of premade packages to speed up development.
I’ll also add, freeCodeCamp has a section on InfoSec - https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/information-security/
Sorry, I misread the original post
Languages! What a good place to learn about security.
One perspective on security is that it’s a specialized measure of a program’s correctness. We want our programs to be correct at things like “When a user enters this piece of text in a forum reply, that piece of text shows up on the thread. At no point does the thread start stealing people’s passwords and sending them to the user who replied.”
And languages play a big part in correctness, especially so when the design of the language makes it easier to write an incorrect program than it is to write a correct program. Look at some of the huge, huge classes of vulnerabilities: cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, buffer overflow, they all come from programs that did the easy thing instead of the correct thing. Learning languages in depth will help you get an intuition about what’s likely to go wrong.
These kinds of mistakes happen everywhere in development, so you end up getting good security insights out of learning heavily used languages:
- HTML → XSS
- SQL → SQL injection
- C → various memory unsafety issues
- Shell → OS command injection
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