// Alternatives
Alternatives to Advanced Penetration Testing
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Advanced Penetration Testing. If Advanced Penetration Testing is the wrong fit at advanced level, start here.
01 · 2018
The Hacker Playbook 3
Peter Kim's hands-on red-team field manual: assumed-breach scenarios, lateral movement, AV/EDR evasion, and the operational rhythm of a real engagement rather than a checklist of CVEs.
Intermediate4/5Peter Kim02 · 2025
Metasploit
The second edition of the definitive No Starch guide to the Metasploit Framework, updated by the project's original maintainers and newer contributors for the modern Framework.
Intermediate4/5David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham03 · 2018
Pentesting Azure Applications
Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.
Intermediate3/5Matt Burrough04 · 2024
Windows Security Internals
Forshaw takes apart the Windows security model from the SRM and access tokens up through Kerberos, with live PowerShell you can run against your own machine. The most authoritative single source on how Windows actually decides who can do what.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw05 · 2017
Attacking Network Protocols
James Forshaw, Project Zero veteran, on how to capture, parse, and break protocols from the wire up to the application layer, with a strong focus on building reusable analysis tooling.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw06 · 2014
Penetration Testing
Georgia Weidman's lab-driven introduction to pentesting, walking the reader from setting up a target environment through scanning, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting.
Beginner4/5Georgia Weidman07 · 2024
Evading EDR
A component-by-component teardown of how modern EDR sensors actually collect telemetry, and where each data source can be starved, blinded, or bypassed.
Advanced4/5Matt Hand08 · 2022
Gray Hat Hacking
A multi-author breadth-first reference covering the modern offensive landscape: web, binary, hardware, IoT, mobile, cloud, and adversarial ML — the closest thing in print to a single-volume snapshot of where offensive security is.
Advanced4/5Allen Harper, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims, Michael Baucom, Daniel Fernandez, Huascar Tejeda, Moses Frost09 · 2007
The Shellcoder's Handbook
A foundational text on memory-corruption exploitation across Linux, Windows, Solaris and embedded targets. Pre-modern-mitigations in spirit but still the canonical introduction to the techniques the modern toolchain is built to defeat.
Advanced4/5Chris Anley, John Heasman, Felix Lindner, Gerardo Richarte10 · 2024
Black Hat Bash
Nick Aleks and Dolev Farhi on getting offensive work done with the shell: privilege escalation tooling, lateral movement, and pipelining bash with the rest of the toolkit.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi