Hello all, This is my first post on afterdawn, although I have been reading here for quite some time. While I am not a newb, I do act in newbish ways occasionally. I am trying to tighten my game and stop my bad practices...while at the same time learn new cool things to do with my workstation. I am pretty savvy with backing up dvd's and my pc games...I have yet to back up my 360 or ps3 games though. I have learned the process and it seems fairly straight forward.Just haven't done it. So whats the next step? How do I continue my education? Some things I want to learn are writing html, maybe writing some flash, I want to learn more about virus's and spyware and how to protect myself and what ared they really capable of? I really have a ton of ?'s but thats enough for now.... Thanks Agent17
While MySpace is a waste of time, it is a great way to introduce yourself to html codes... at least that's how I learned. I got annoyed at the little banners and crap that those MySpace codes always left on your page, so I started by pasting any URL I found in the code into my browser to see what image would show up. If it was the annoying banner, then I would delete that part of the code. Then I moved on to a phpBB2 forum with a html portal page. That's where I put the stuff I learned from MySpace codes to use and the portal page taught me how to create and layout a webpage. FireFox also has an add-on called View Source Chart, which allows you to see the html codes for a webpage you are viewing. Basically all I do is learn to use Google properly. HiJackThis and MalwareBytes logs are the key. If something looks suspicious in those logs, especially exe and dll files... I search for it on Google to see if it's a legitimate file or process and what program it's associated with. It also helps drastically to learn a little bit about regedit and gpedit.msc. Gpedit.msc is Microsoft's Group Policy Editor. Many times viruses disable various features like disabling the regedit or not allowing you to right click on My Computer to access various tools. All that gpedit.msc does is add/change various registry setting. Hope that at least helps get you started...
Props to you dawgzdoc. It sounds like you learned the basics of several things, now you're looking at where to go next. I was pretty much at the same point a little while ago, and what I realized was that I needed to choose a direction. Web design interests me, so (since I already know HTML at a pretty good level) I'm learning CSS, and then probably moving to to Flash and Java (maybe even FBML?). If you're looking towards the more technical side of internet, you could go from HTML to PHP and more technical Java. If you like the whole backing up DVDs thing, you could move on to consoles (like you said), then maybe take a step into torrenting, converting, decrypting, etc. Viruses/spyware are another direction, although if you get into the specifics you'll probably need to get into some pretty shady sites. I don't know if you have an interest in programming, but for Windows programming I'd recommend starting off with Visual Basic, then going into C/C++ or maybe C#. So it really depends what you wanna do. At the basic level, it's easy to do everything, but when you start getting into the advanced stuff, it's helpful to pick a direction. And if you need any help with anything, just post here on AD and we'll all be happy to help you. Good luck!
