How to push further as a programmer?

Question

For the last, hmm, 6 months I\'ve been reading into Programming in C, I got myself K&Rv2, BEEJ\'s socket guide, Expert C programming, Linux Systems Programming, the ISO/IEC

Answer 1

You say you're interested in security. Go look up some exploits and try to understand them. Better yet, try to find an exploit yourself, for a known (better: unknown) vulnerability.

Write an NNTP client, or an SMTP server, or client, and use it to send your mail. Many of these internet protocols are simple enough to not be very difficuly to implement (most of the text-based protocols), yet nuanced enough to be interesting, and they have the connection to the real world that makes it more satisfying than a "hello world" program.

Or how about writing a linux kernel module? They're not that hard to write, there's just a bit of a barrier to entry (lots to learn before you can have your "black triangle"). Make a character device that returns an endless stream of the last byte you wrote to it (call it /dev/fortytwo if you like). Then make sure it will work when two processes use it simultaneously.

Look for some project with crappy code but friendly community, and clean some of it up. GCC and the kernel would be bad choices here :)