Build the foundations cybersecurity professionals actually rely on, from first principles to working fluency.Applied Cybersecurity: Foundations to Mastery, Volume I is a comprehensive, hands-on guide that takes you from the fundamentals of risk and network security through cryptography, secure programming, compliance, digital forensics, threat intelligence, and the AI foundations every modern practitioner now needs, and on into the first of the advanced material: modern cryptographic practice and security governance at scale. Whether you are an undergraduate meeting the field for the first time, a career-changer building a base, or a working professional filling in the gaps, Volume I gives you the core skills the rest of the discipline is built on.Most security books either drown beginners in theory or hand them a cookbook of disconnected recipes. This one does neither. Every concept is explained from the ground up and anchored in real incidents, from NotPetya's billion-dollar blast radius and the Mirai botnet that took down half the internet to Log4Shell and Heartbleed, so you understand not just what went wrong, but why, and how to stop it happening to you.What is insideEleven chapters, foundations first. Risk and the threat landscape, networking and system architecture, secure programming, cryptography from first principles, compliance and management, an introduction to digital forensics and penetration testing, cyberthreat intelligence, the AI and machine-learning foundations security now demands, and law, ethics, and AI governance, then a step up into advanced cryptography (including post-quantum) and security frameworks and GRC at scale.Hands-on from the first chapter. Guided labs run on a free, open-source Docker stack (Kali Linux, OWASP Juice Shop, and more), so there is no expensive tooling to buy.Runnable code, not just diagrams. Paired Jupyter notebooks let you parse live network traffic, break weak ciphers, and watch attacks unfold in a safe sandbox.Deliberately connected. Each chapter builds on the last and points forward to Volume II, with a built-in tool reference and glossary so nothing is left unexplained.Who it is for. Students, self-learners, and professionals who want substance over buzzwords and a base they can actually build on. If you can use a command line and you are willing to get your hands dirty, Volume I will teach you to think like an attacker and build like a defender.Clear enough for newcomers, rigorous enough to last: the groundwork for everything in Volume II.