I went to a university fair today and realized I had to choose what I wanted to go into before going into university. I decided on the computer science course, and to specialize in in databases, networks, or security (or a combination?) because that's what interests me. Just to make sure these careers are what I think they are, I'm going to do some reading and buy a book about one (or all) this week.

Can somebody recommend some books to look at (Grok has some nice books, and the list is outdated!), or a website with an overview of these careers? Can somebody in the fields tell me how you like it?

Those are often "how-to" guides for using current technology; it gets boring fast. I'd suggest going into computer science research stuff.

I've been reading Hacking Exposed for some time now at work. It's quite interesting, I've learned a lot about both networking and hacking.

I would recommend signing up for mailing lists at securityfocus.com. I subscribe to 6 different mailing lists there (bugtraq, security-basics, focus-linux, focus-ids, and others), and learn a lot just reading them.

But I get about 30 or 40 emails during the day, and that many more in the evening/night, every day from those lists. But I enjoy reading them.

Mitnick's book on social engineering is apparently also quite good. I'm going to read it after i'm done Hacking Exposed. I forget what it's called, but I can get the name Monday.

I've read it. "Art of Deception", it's okay.

[quote author=$t0rm link=board=2;threadid=8837;start=0#msg82089 date=1096191331]
I've read it. "Art of Deception", it's okay.
[/quote]

That's the one! It looks like it's worth reading, and I will.