Programming background
Before we proceed further in this chapter, I have to address the topic of your programming background in detail to help and guide you in the right direction as regards programming languages. I was a programmer for around 10 years before I turned into a full-time cyber-security expert. I can tell you that the experience that I acquired during my programming career greatly helped me in becoming successful in the field of application security. After all, how can you give an expert advice if you've never developed a web application in your life?
Programming languages are divided into categories, and and they share a lot of similarities (more than you can imagine). Later in this chapter, I will show you the coding security checks (for web applications), but without referring to a specific one, because the checklist can be applied to any web application programming language.
Here's what you need to know about the most popular programming languages, and about the category to...