Please expand. How would you recommend I go about to learn this (not in a formal setting)? I can not afford to take classes and because of a head injury doubt I could complete it successfully anyways.

In your list I notice you do not mention learning any programming language. Why is that?

What do you mean by "OS shell integration"?  Is that saying I need to learn BASH as opposed to Python?

"string operations must mean BASH....

when you say "regular expressions"  is this a good resource here? Would I use this with BASH or Python or both?

I notice that in http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ there is a section that covers using Python with websites so handling and forming automated web requests is probably covered in more advanced  Python tutorials.

So to sum it up I think I need to learn Python and BASH. Is this correct? I also need to learn XML,  JSON  (what do you mean when you say "from xml.dom import minidom ; import json") and SQL
:-)~MIKE~(-:

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For all the pen testing and hacker stuff I went through (7 some odd years ago), here's what you'll want to know how to do, in approximate order of priority:

xml and json parsing (from xml.dom import minidom ; import json)
connecting to and using a database (learn enough SQL to be able to navigate around one here too), learning sqlalchemy will be enough to land you a job in the field
OS shell integration (import os)
string operations
regular expressions (import re)
handling and forming automated web requests