A long, long time ago in a far away galaxy script kiddies were people who couldn’t write their own programs and had to use other  peoples programs.  Now with the complexity of everything, I don’t know of a hacker that doesn’t use a program or exploit that someone else has written at least on some occasion. So I guess that makes us all script kiddies on some level. Today I believe that term is used more for people that use programs or exploits that they have no clue at all as to how it works.  Go to the Defcon event in Vegas and you will run into a lot of teenagers that don’t know  what a port is really. They know its something that should be open and that’s about it. That’s not to say there are some very knowledgeable people there, but they do have their fair share of script kiddies. 
  My advice to anyone just getting into all this is, learn TCP/IP. I mean really learn it very well. Don’t just memorize the stack protocols but see if you can actually visualize the entire process in your mind’s eye. Understand how the software works with the hardware to move a frame and how all this works together in a network.  This will pay off dividends later when working with tools, etc...  Even a book like TCP/IP for Dummies is really not a bad place to start, but dont  let it end there.  This would be my basic advice to a beginner and I promise they will not be disappointed later down the road.

Hey thanks.  Yes, a friend sent that to me a while back and that’s a great little animation. Everyone should take a few moments and watch it

 Yes being able to repair the exploit code posted on the net is an important skill. Some people post code with intentional errors to mess up script kiddies. Those errors are usually small ones like a missing } or something commented out that should not be.

TCP and IP seem to go hand in hand in most literature, does anyone know if there are texts teaching SCTP/IP or SCTP/IPv6? You never know, in the future this could be the book that gets recommended to newbs if SCTP ever catches on. I know squat about SCTP so any recommendations would be welcomed.

Jim