Ask HN: Advice for a fledgling hacker?

[wihon]

_Hacking For Dummies_

OK. I'm pretty new around here.

I've been scouting HN for a few months as a passive user, and I've seen a lot of interesting stuff. You guys seem like you've got a pretty solid community going on. A good number of the questions that get posted are answered in real depth, and most of the links are of a good quality - and are of interest to a newbie like myself.

I've decided that I'd like to join up and get more involved in the world of hacking. Plus, I plan to post some interesting stuff. :)

(I've also signed up at reddit, but I don't necessarily expect to get good answers to questions. Once you cut all the crap out of your front page and post to specific subreddits, it gets better, but there's still a lot of pointless commenting and posting going on.)

I'm currently a science undergrad. I've got HTML and CSS nailed - I started off with the easy stuff - and now I'm getting pretty good at hacking about with JS thats almost what I want, but not quite. Hence the messing around.

So far I've had some advice from a certain friendly duck, who told me about the importance of knowing how to write good algorithms.

Have you guys got any other advice for a newbie programmer? For example, what programming language would you recommend I started with? And do you have any ideas about how to get a foot in the door of the hacking world (like good experience and making contacts)?

Even the most general and obvious stuff is much appreciated - as, more likely than not, it won't be obvious to me!

Thanks very much! :)

- Wihon

[davidw]

* Get involved with open source.

* Ruby and Python are good languages that you can do a lot with.

* Eventually, knowing some C would be a good idea.

* Run Linux as your desktop.

[wihon]

Thanks!

> * Get involved with open source.

Say, by helping improve the code of open source apps, etc?

And if you had to choose between directing my attention towards Ruby or Python...?

I'm currently in desperate need of a new laptop. Can you recommend any basic requirements for programming? I have a rough idea - something along the lines of lots of RAM and not much else - but getting it from the horses mouth (no offense (: ) would be ideal.

Thanks again!