I was once a capable programmer in BASIC, COBOL, and Pascal (Delphi). I began learning C and Java but never finished my degree. I worked as a network engineer and system analyst for some time, but I have never gotten back into programming. I ended up spending a number of years in the Army, spending little time with computers professionally until a couple of years ago when I was appalled to find myself more knowledgeable than the corporate head of networking regarding security, VPNs, and Linux. I sat next to a server with unpatched, known hardware vulnerabilities, connected to the internet through a ten-year-old firewall appliance via ISDN, and was told that ARM and Linux were too insecure to be on our network.
I want to be able to help my children (who are learning python) so I need to learn. This challenge might be just the thing to get me to enjoy coding again.
I personally found Python’s official documentation is really excellent place to start, you can get quite far just from following their tutorial and in-depth explanations compared to most tutorials or even online courses.
Trust me, I was baffled by the statement of insecurity too, especially since our servers weren’t yet patched for numerous known hardware security vulnerabilities.
I was once a Linux admin a long time ago, but I have forgotten a lot. I had a few explosions near me in Iraq and think maybe I have a hard time remembering some things due to that. I am not sure. Either way, I shouldn’t know more about IS than the guy running the network given the amount of time I’ve been out of the game professionally.
Our tech support once asked me to try new ram on a machine with a corrupt windows registry… I had to explain ram…it was bad.
