Programming in Systems Security as a career

[cdelapena]

How will learning C++ (or any other language) help me in my career -- Systems Security? If programming does help, which language would be the most useful to know?

[DBelton]

that all depends on what aspect of system security you are going to be going into.

For the most part, on *nix systems, C++ and bash scripting will do you the most good. It would also be good to learn perl and python as well.

A lot of systems security is mainly changing config files and writing/modifying scripts, unless you want to go into actually writing the applications used.

[mwette]

IMO being a script guru will do better. Better to learn bash/sh and python.
It takes a lot of time to master C++. Time would be better spent on learning the security features of unix (PAM, selinux, etc).