Career dilemma

[xmaddness]

I would have to agree with what the others have said.

If your looking to spend some time and money towards getting there, you may want to consider taking some cisco classes to get a feel for how networking and ACL's (access control lists) work, as well as fire walling using their PIX firewalls. Learning a PIX firewall system would be a good primer for learning the basics behind network security (at least on the switching/routing level).

Juridian also brings up a good point that even on the programming level we have to worry about security. Things in this arena includes input validation, SQL validation, keeping constraints properly, and encrypting sensitive information properly. Further more wrapping and kind of information going over the internet into ssl, wraping that in vpn tunnels, for any kind of traversal of sensative info, regardless of the socket protocol used.

I however took the degree path over the certificate path. It will help you learn, how to learn, much of the aspects of computer sciences and engineering, which tends to greatly increase your learning curve of any new systems.


Have fun learning your new path.

-xmad