Web Application Security

Chapter 29. Conclusion

You have completed Web Application Security. Ideally you have learned a lot about securing and exploiting web applications that you can take elsewhere and put to good use. There is still much more to learn. To become a web application security expert, you will need to be exposed to many more topics, technologies, and scenarios.

This book isn’t a comprehensive glossary of web application security lessons; instead, the topics were specifically chosen based on a few criteria.

First off, I wanted to make sure that each topic was applicable to a wide range of web applications. This is because I wanted it to be full of practical information that could be digested and then put to good use.

Second, each topic had to be either at the recommended skill level, or at a level that could be gained from studying previous chapters of the book. This means that the difficulty and knowledge required for each topic had to scale linearly with the previous knowledge presented. I couldn’t skip around and expect the reader to find knowledge elsewhere; otherwise it would have become more of a glossary-style book instead of an immersive cover-to-cover read.

Third, each topic in the book had to have some relation to the others in order for the book to flow easily from cover to cover. I found that in my own reading, few technical books and even fewer security books were organized carefully enough that I could just open one up and start learning where I left off without having to skip ...