Prerequisites for

Computer Security: A Global Challenge
Finch, James H. (Editor) / Dougall, E. Grahm (Editor). 1984 (Currently out of print). 580 pages.
Categories: Conference Proceedings
This book and its review here are a waste of your reading time. That being said, I really enjoyed reading what was important to computer security practitioners back in 1984. The predictions of the presenters mostly fall into two categories: 1) Those that never came true (i.e. the wonders of Bell-LaPadula) and 2) those that have still not come true (widely deployed RSA-enabled smart cards for personal banking are just around the corner)
Equally entertaining is
* Martin Hellman’s (of Diffie-Hellman fame) presentation against nuclear war (it promised to show its implications to computer security and encryption, but never quite did)
* Fred Cohan’s views on viruses
* That a 10^4 keyspace can be exhausted in as little as an hour and 23 minutes.
* That every presenter had their own weird proprietary taxonomy for how their corner of the security world should be organized.

Recommended prerequisite books:
This book:   
       
(Read review)
Suggested mathematical background in:

N/A

Suggested computer language experience:

-  BASIC
-  Prolog
-  Fortran