UGN Security Forums UGN Security: Knowledge Base Programming C/C++ CC+ TO LEARN

AT THE MOMMENT I AM TRIANING TO BEACOME A NETWORKING TECH AND WOULD LIKE TO GO TO SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT BUT WAS WONDERING IF SOMEONE COULD TAKE THE TIME TO TELL ME HOW EASY IT IS WITH NO PROGRAMING EXPERIANCE TO LEARN CC+ WILL I HAVE MANY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS OR DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY RECOMENDATIONS OF WHAT PROGRAMING PROGRAMIN LANGUAGE TO LEARN FOR THE BEST H P V C KNOWLEDGE I HEAR THAT CC+ IS THE BEST TO START OF WITH ?????

Oh, you'll have some restless nights; but it's worth it to take the time to learn C#/C++

gizmo i have just got the post,

could i ask in what ways does cc+ affect the ability to hack and what sort of situations could i ask would it resolve

Well, no programming language will just grant you magical hacking powers; it will however give you the ability to code applications and understand how things are created...

It'll also grant you the ability to learn how to create business class applications as well as aid groups of people who can further teach you other methods and abilities...

Think of learning to program as a large baby step in ones thirst for knowledge...

build a knowledge base to store what you learn.
more learn,more think,more do.

Yeah programming requires a lot of knowledge of the "inner workings" of computers, and the software that runs on them. Hackers take advantage of this knowledge and do what they can. A good network admin would have an understanding of how hackers exploit software running on a network to take advantage of it, and then try to prevent it, but hackers will always prevail so programming custom utilities to do backups or maintenance is definitely a plus. If you're decent at math, programming will come naturally to you. You just have to get over that fear of learning something new and dive into your first "Hello World" application. Good luck. I'm trying to be more active on the forums, so if you have any specific questions, feel free to post. I always like to look at the example source, and learn from that... and as far as network tech, "socket programming" is important, and I assume you've read the IP/TCP/UDP/ICMP/DNS (and any other applicable) RFC's?

If not here is the IP protocol to start: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc791.html

I highly recommend you learn C not C++, C++ is C with added bull [censored], that just leads to crappy programming. If you do it in C, and you thought it through, you'll not only have a better understanding of what is going on, but better control of your program too.

and I always like reading about the language itself first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)

But I like cpp and c# lol

I've heard it is good to learn c++ before c, I've been reading books on both... I'm new to computer programming still, I've been trying Python and VB C++, I'd like to do something with audio file editing, as well as database editing i.e. taking a bunch of files from a several file trees and move them all at somewhere at once... (on second thought I think windows does that...ehm...ok next program) or make something that allows me to compare the contents of many branches of a file tree and replace them based on size, date modified and name.

I have a problem whenever I back up files from my laptop to an external hard drive; I usually select everything I want to back up (audio files, pictures, video, text) and move it over to the external hard drive. Problem is I don't want to build up duplicates of files I've moved or make copies of copies of copies (iTunes has killed me on this... ::groan::), or most importantly, replace files that have the same name but may be a different file (those "untitled" documents for example). Whenever I transfer the files, I usually tell the computer to replace whatever it finds. I'm uncomfortable doing it this way, but otherwise I have to tell it not to replace every single duplicate file (of which there are thousands).

Well, The reason I suggest learning C is because it uses "real" data types. Whereas C++ has all this bullshit like strings, which lead beginning programmers to believe there is such a datatype... And there is not. So thats why, imo, I suggest learning C.

As for audio programming, that can be pretty complex depending on the file format you want to edit. What exactly were you trying to 'edit'? (File format, and what about the file?)

For your backup program, I suggest performing a checksum on the files, and you can compare the checksum, and normally files will not 'collide' and you can tell if they are different files by comparing the sums. Modified/accessed dates can be altered/invalid/missing/etc. And not all "edits" will increase the file size either. Although once you find that the file is indeed different those might be handy to look at if available. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724320(VS.85).aspx for more information on how to call GetFileTime. Also, you don't need to choose a strong checksum that can be slower to calculate -- CRC should be good enough.

It would be wave files, although it would be nice to be flexible enough to support others such as aiff, mp3, mp4, acc, ogg, flac, wma. Primarily though, all I need to edit is wave files.

They could be song length files or files only about >0-30 secs at least 44.1kHz 16bit stereo.

Ok, I've never actually gone as far to read the sound data from an mp3, But I did learn enough about the MPEG specification to read an mp3 frame by frame, and identify information about the stream such as bitrate, sample length, the compressed sound-data. This allowed me to calculate things like the average bitrate of the mp3 and I also read about some of the metadata associated with them such as ID3(v1/1.1/2) tags and the XING header.... So I can tell you about all that stuff if you're interested; but what it sounds like to me is you want to decode the data itself so that you can alter the sample and make some beats .

I really recommend using someone elses library for reading the sound files there is too many varieties of formats. Even a wav file is just a container, its just convention to use LPCM data, but not required... So you'd have to support "hundreds" of different codecs etc. Whereas if you used say libsnd file, you can read N frames and it will always give you a standardized output, much easier to work with. You still get to combine the samples and tweak them with your code.

I skimmed over http://www.tactilemedia.com/info/MCI_Control_Info.html looked like it had everything you'd need to know to get to work.

I'm teaching myself guitar, so I do have an interest in music theory and stuff if you want to collaborate on the effects themselves, I might be able to pull some calculus out of my [censored].

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation too

and also thank you for the info!

I'm going to lock this thread so that we just use http://www.UnderGroundNews.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/49824/Audio%20app%20programming.html