Congrats Alucian! Looks like you need to update your signature

I've to submit my report by 14 November. I'm almost done, just have to perform some backend infrastructure tests though. Hopefully, I'll be an eCPPT by the end of this month.

Great giveaway! Good luck to all participating members.

Hello, hungrymind!

I am  eLearnsecuirty's PTP course student. xXxKrisxXx and I did a small post comparing PWB and PTP. You can find it here
http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54/topic,5938.msg31605/#msg31605

Let me know if you've more questions, I'll be happy to help =)

COm_BOY wants to ask whether you want a commercial tool or an opensource tool?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

This is my standard 'building your lab' response at EH-Net  which I copy-paste from one thread to another. Hope you'll find it helpful.

You do not need any expensive stuff to build your 'virtual' test lab. In fact most of the stuff in my lab is absolutely free. You can find various open source counterparts of commercial tools.
There are various 'free' virtualization products available like virtualbox, vmware player and vmware server. I'm a big fan of vmware products. Personally, I believe that vmware server will be enough for what you want to do. Vmware server is a stripped down version of the excellent commercial vmware workstation but contains almost all the basic features you'll require. You can download pre-built linux virtual machines from the vmware website http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/
There's also a free route to get Windows OS. Either you can download the OS from Microsoft's website which comes with around 3 month trial period. Furthermore, you can also download Windows XP SP2 virtual machine from  NIST's website http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/windows-xp-machine-setup
As for the softwares like ftp, telnet daemons and webservers etc...well most of them are free anyway 

Jhaddix and Laz3r have posted wonderful tutorials to build a virtual test lab. You can get them here:-
Network pentest lab setup    
Pentest Lab: Web Application Edition

Additionally, you can practice on ready made targets like De-ICE live disks, hackerdemia and pWnOS all of which are available here http://forums.heorot.net/  You also have LAMP security disks http://sourceforge.net/projects/lampsecurity/  Also try your hands at the 'Skillz' section of this forum http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54/board,12.0/ They will test your limits.
There's also a topic here at EHNet which will direct you to more stuff for practicing http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54/topic,5043.0/

Congrats Jason!

You might want to check some links I posted few months back http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54/topic,5541.0/

Do you have basic understanding of C/C++, specifically arrays,strings and pointers? If not then it'll be useful to firstly get some programming experience. I suggest reading "C programming language" http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0131103628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284897188&sr=8-1

You can then move to assembly language tutorials from securitytube especially videos 1,2,3,4 and 11. (I suggest watching all the videos, but if you can't then don't miss at least these five)
http://www.securitytube.net/Assembly-Primer-for-Hackers-%28Part-1%29-System-Organization-video.aspx

Armed with this knowledge it should be easy for you to understand bufferoverflows.
Again, securitytube has free buffer overflow primer videos. I found these very useful.
http://www.securitytube.net/Buffer-Overflow-Primer-Part-1-%28Smashing-the-Stack%29-video.aspx

Congrats guys!

I also vote for a new board. There's a lot of stuff going in mobile security which wireless security doesn't encompass.

I know it's an old topic. But I found some new cheat sheets and didn't want to make a new thread.
Approx 70 cheat sheets for Linux users.
http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets---the-ultimate-collection/

Which book are you referencing?

You might also want to consider the following free lectures from Stanford.
CS106-B Programming Abstractions: Teaches C++ programming. Natural successor to CS106-A which teaches programming methodology in Java
http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=11f4f422-5670-4b4c-889c-008262e09e4e
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity?blend=2&ob=4#g/c/FE6E58F856038C69

CS106-A Programming Methodology
http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=824a47e1-135f-4508-a5aa-866adcae1111
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity?blend=2&ob=4#g/c/84A56BC7F4A1F852
I haven't gone through both of the above, but I checked the first video of CS106A and I guess you'll be fine if you jump straight into CS106B.

I'm currently going through CS107. Excellent stuff. It's a must if you want to learn some advanced programming basics. Highly recommended. It basically teaches what happens under the hood, so don't study from it if don't already know basic C/C++.
CS107 Programming Paradigms
http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=2d712634-2bf1-4b55-9a3a-ca9d470755ee
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity?blend=2&ob=4#g/c/9D558D49CA734A02

Edit: Just found a really good paper or Pointers. Do read it.
cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/PointersAndMemory.pdf

@dynamik
Nothing related to this thread, but just wanted to tell you that if you ever start learning from shellcoder's handbook use an old distro for the first 4-5 chapters. Preferably Redhat Linux 8 and above.
The examples used in these chapters assume that you've absolutely no protection enabled in your system- NX bits, ASLR... Even Redhat Linux 9 uses ASLR, built in the kernel and can't be disabled, and so you won't be able to use it for a LOT of exploits.
Majority of these protections can be disabled in the current distributions but there are still hidden elements which prevent your code from working properly. I learned all of this the hard way

It's still fun to first test your code in an old distro and then try to make it work in the newer ones

Have you ever tried to pass an array as an argument to a function? How do you do this?<-- Think on this for a moment, and try to find a solution for it.
Also, how do you allocate dynamic memory?

I learned C programming (I'm not very good at C++ though I can read and understand the code) and especially pointers from a lot of books and online articles, so I can't direct you to any absolute resource. However, a good starting point will be to clear your concepts pertaining to arrays and strings and how they're stored in memory and then move to pointer. Learn all about pointers,pointers to arrays/strings, array of pointers (different form pointer to arrays), function pointers, pointers to other datatypes and try to compare how using a pointer is different from using that variable in a normal way. At each point try to visualize what's happening in the memory.

Here are some resource which might help you.
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/lesson6.html
http://www.augustcouncil.com/~tgibson/tutorial/ptr.html
http://c-faq.com/ptrs/index.html
http://c-faq.com/malloc/index.html
http://c-faq.com/aryptr/index.html