I'm def a newbie and have asked some simlilar questions around the interwebz :epic:
With hacking it depends on what type of hacking you want to do, you gotta be more specific. Do you want to do website hacking, or get into pentesting, or malware/viruses/trojans etc, or code exploiting. It all depends.
For me I want to get into pentesting so I'm learning a lot about networking and learning python. Before you break and or modify something, you gotta understand how it works
Since you already have knowledge in some areas like programming and networking that's awesome and you could get into some stuff like pentesting if you want.
Here are some books I see reccomended a lot:
(Amazon Links | Hope this odesn't break rule 17, I'm just using google's url shortener because the amazon links are quite long.)
http://goo.gl/7WKJX0 - Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking
http://goo.gl/cCPZpj - The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing
http://goo.gl/RlHJ7Y - Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
Read some books, practice, code, get acive on the forum, eat, sleep, repeat. :Laughing: Hope to see ya around gihoosh