You ignored the "watered down" and jumped on the "tall order". For someone new to the industry (rather, 'scene') I think that booklist will take ~2 years just

You ignored the "watered down" and jumped on the "tall order". For someone new to the industry (rather, 'scene') I think that booklist will take ~2 years just to grok. For an experienced hacker, specially one coming from systems programming, compiler hacking, binary analysis, emulation, or cryptography, specially one who spent his youth dipping into actual blackhat hacking and reversing, then the industry has absolutely no appeal. You can make more money writing an optimizer for an ARM processor for one phone model than you would working in the security industry. My position is: security is not worth it, unless you're some government MCSE who ends up sent to seminars and conferences on Wireshark and IDA Pro. Infosec is churning out doe-eyed nobodies faster than Clown University. The people who actually matter, and make a difference, earned their stripes hacking out of their parents basement in their teens.