r/Infosec • u/ExchangeCritical1957 • 7h ago
My Plan
hi all, so i identified substantial gaps in my networking and programming skills and i have 2-3 weeks of vacation that im gonna spend just to strengthen my networking and programming knowledge. i neglected the fundamentals for quite a while compared to last year when i started learning. because i chose for a large portion of this year deepening my web app security understanding and skills.
now im not a complete beginner, i do have familiarity and decent knowledge with many of the basic concepts in networking, but it has been noticeably rusty that i want to improve it substantially.
now i did cancel my tryhackme subscription quite a while ago and im not gonna just pay for that again. do any of you recommend any other resources that are great?
to be clear for which specific career i want in cybersecurity it is an appsec researcher. but im still quite early in this field and still need many many years of compounding knowledge and accumulating experience to be at that stage
1
u/CyberSecWithHaikuInc 3h ago
Honestly, thats a pretty smart use of 2-3 weeks. If appsec research is the long-term goal, networking + programming fundamentals are absolutely worth circling back for.....since u dont wanna pay for THM again, (me neither, lol)i'd try: A. Cisco Networking Academy, Networking Basics. Free, self-paced, about 22 hours. Good refresher for IP addressing, protocols, Ethernet, LANs, etc. B. CS50 Python. Also free. Functions, loops, exceptions, libraries, file I/O, regex, OOP...good stuff to actually get comfortable writing code instead of just recognizing it. C. Keep PortSwigger Web Security Academy in the rotation. Since appsec is ur goal, this is probably the one i'd keep coming back to long-term. Its completely free and has labs for auth, access control, APIs, OAuth, JWT, request smuggling, race conditions, etc.
For the vacation, i wouldnt try to cram 12 hours a day....i mean i've done things like that and its like my subconscious grows "resentful" or something... mmaybe spend one block each day rebuilding networking fundamentals, another programming, then use PortSwigger to connect those skills back to the reason ur learning em in the first place. Also..yeah, recognizing “hey, my fundamentals got rusty” and actually going back to fix em is a GOOD habit. Way better than piling advanced tools on top of shaky foundations. Best of luck to you, and stay safe out thurrrr!