Professional associations

joining a association will depend on what you are looking-for from them. you usually get a mixture of good and boring information for them. but they can be a good place to make and meet resources. if you join a group with fees. see about attending a meeting first to see if you can interact and/or get what you want to out of the group.
the group fall into several different catagorys. local, state, regional, nationwide, international. you will want to choose a local if you want to attend all the meetings or if not you might choose one where you can't attend all the meeting but you get good info. from them by mail/mag/internet/etc.

There are some excellent organizations & some that are a thinly disguised excuse to have a user group or to get away from the office for partying with fellow "professionals."

Depending on what you want out of these organizations, they can be a great check on your education ... e.g. is your academic computer science worth a damn in touch with reality, kind of like what Free Markets does to tell companies if their pricing is competitive. What do you need to learn to be proficient in some areaof IT.

Then there are the standards ... is your programming based on some consistency with the rest of the IT world, or is it based on people who learned programming by learning programming totally divorced from what the profession has learned inthe last 50 years or so, making mistakes that other areas of IT have long since learned not to make.

Books ... what should you be familiar with if you claim to be an expert in some area.

Theories ... is your computer security reactive or pro active?