Programming for Security Professionals – Chapter 7

This chapter is an introduction into programming for the Security Professional. It is an overview of C, HTML, and Perl programing. It began with some basics about Branching, Looping, and Testing. Branching takes you from one area of a program to another area. Looping is the act of performing a task over and over. The loop usually completes after testing is conducted on a variable and returns a value of true or false.

The most popular programming language is C. When writing an algorithm it is critical to have clear program code documentation. The text has several different charts giving descriptions of each of the following topics Compilers, Characters, Variable types, Specifiers, and Operators. Security Professionals should have a basic understanding of Peril and c because many security tools are written in these languages. With this knowledge a Security Professional could modify the security tools and construct their own customized program.

The chapter concludes with reviewing Object-Oriented Programing Concepts along with an overview of Ruby. Again there are some charts listing the functions and their descriptions. Overall the chapter provided some insights on the fundamentals of programing and it was not overwhelming.