ahh sorry, didn't quite understand. C programming is definately a good start, you can also throw in some PHP or Perl. If you are doing network pentesting, TCP/IP is the basis of everything. Learn TCP/IP first and branch from there. If you understand TCP/IP up and down, you should be able to understand the theory behind a lot of network attacks. Then just comes translating that theory into C or any programming language that will allow such actions. If you are an expert in C, you should know sockets. I would get a strong knowledge of C and machine code. Learn assembly language(x86 or whatever) along with C. Then learn as much TCP/IP as you can. You want a strong understanding of how TCP/IP works. Then you can go ahead and learn sockets in C. It does you no good to learn sockets in C if you dont know crap about TCP/IP.

For programming languages like Perl, PHP, etc, I think those are safe to learn independent of other stuff. PHP is linked strongly with HTML, so learning those two is an obvious. Perl is Perl, and you can learn that whenever you want.


Learn C and Assembly -> Learn TCP/IP -> Learn how to program for TCP/IP seems to make sense, but then again, there are people smarter than me so maybe they have better advice