How do I learn how to be a hacker?

Before I can answer this, I think it's critical to differentiate between what hackers call "white hat" and "black hat" hacking. A white hat is someone who is intensely curious about computers, computer networks and how things work and fit together. A black hat, by contrast, is interested in destruction, mischief and mayhem.

A virus that pops up a message encouraging you to pick better passwords for your network accounts is pretty much white hat. A virus that destroys your hard drive data or logs - and later transmits - all of your account and password pairs is deep in the black hat zone.

Good hackers, people who are interested in poking around and non-destructively figuring out how things work are the kind of people I like to hang around with. They're smart and can be quite tricky. Black hat folk? Not my bag, and I feel quite strongly about the punishment that should be meted out to those that cause mayhem and destroy or steal personal or business data.

If you want to learn how to be a bad guy, black hat hacker, I won't help you out whatsoever. If you want to learn how to poke around and figure out through experimentation how things work, however, that's cool, let's talk...

A first step for learning how to hack is unquestionably to install, run and learn everything you can about Linux. For many reasons, it's the operating system of choice for hackers and programmers, but the best reason is because it's so incredibly easy to learn how to write code with Linux systems.

Then, programming language-wise, I'd suggest that you start out learning Perl, then graduate to C or C++, and if you want to hack around with Web pages and widgets, PHP as a scripting language. I personally tend to do much of my experimentation with Linux shell scripts (all of which also run on a Mac OS X system) but if you're starting afresh, Perl is far more powerful Hackers I've talked with also recommend Python or Ruby / Ruby on Rails as good alternative languages.

There are also many online hacking communities, but I'd be careful as many of them are cliquish and, as you've already found out, are prone to saying "prove yourself" rather than actually answering any questions you might have.

Check Amazon.com for books on hacking [afflink]. There are a surprising number available, some of which are even pretty good.

There are also conferences you can attend if you want to get into the culture of hacking, the most well-known being Defcon. It's a mixed bag, though, and the FBI famously watch for black hat folk, so chose your friends careful at an event like that.

One more tip: Subscribe to the monthly magazine Linux Journal as it has lots of articles in each issue talking about how to mess around with name servers, web sites, and so on. Fun stuff and (fair disclosure) I write for the publication too.