alien8predator,

good advice when starting out is to read everything you can get your hads on. This site can be a good starting point, with links off to various other good sources.

Unless your Linux skills are great to start with you may want to download BackTrack to get some working tools. De-ice.net also have some nice virtual machines that you can use as target machines when starting to get your feet wet.

Welcome to EH-net, happy hunting

Depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

If you are trying to automate routines and tool usage, go for something like shell or perl.

If you want to code exploits or tools from scratch go the C route.

This topic has been covered extensively in these forums previously so I'd recommend the search box for more analysis.

I would definitely recommend learning to program though as it can difficult to use/fix/modify existing tools without the base knowledge.

thanks for the advice. I'll read the two pinned threads. The thing I'm wanting to learn is how to hack company systems and after having hacked in being able to tighten up the security. that's my dream job. Internet Security. Which programming language is useful for that? thanks for all the welcomes