// Comparison

Advanced Penetration Testing vs Metasploit: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Offensive, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Advanced

3/52017

Hacking the World's Most Secure Networks

Wil Allsopp

A red-teamer's tour of getting into high-security targets without Metasploit, leaning on custom C2, social engineering, and tradecraft. Strong ideas, uneven execution.

Intermediate

4/52025

Metasploit

The Penetration Tester's Guide

David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham

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.

Read this if

Working pentesters who want to move past tool-driven engagements and build their own payloads and C2 against hardened, monitored environments.

Pentesters and red teamers who want to know Metasploit cold, or developers who want to extend the Framework. Written by the original project leads and updated for the current ecosystem; the canonical Metasploit text.

Skip this if

Beginners, and anyone wanting a polished, reproducible lab manual. Skip this if you need code you can copy-paste and run, the listings are illustrative and dated.

Readers wanting modern post-exploitation tradecraft against well-defended targets. Metasploit shines in lab and OSCP-style scenarios; against modern EDR with kernel callbacks, the playbook is more nuanced than this book covers.

Key takeaways

Against mature targets the interesting work is custom tooling and tradecraft, not off-the-shelf frameworks.
A realistic APT-style engagement is a campaign, social engineering, staged payloads, and patient C2, not a single exploit.
Evading EDR and egress controls is a design problem you solve before the engagement, not a flag you toggle during it.

Metasploit's value is workflow integration: payloads, post-exploitation modules, sessions, pivoting all wired together. The book teaches you to use the framework as a force multiplier, not as a list of exploits.
Custom modules (auxiliary, exploit, post) are how you turn Metasploit into your toolkit; the book's chapters on module development are the highest-leverage material.
The 2nd edition (2025) is updated for the modern Framework, mainstream Linux, and the current model of Meterpreter; the original 2011 edition is now dated.

How they compare

We rate Metasploit higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Advanced Penetration Testing). For most readers, that means Metasploit is the primary pick and Advanced Penetration Testing is a useful follow-up.

Advanced Penetration Testing is pitched at advanced level. Metasploit is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Advanced Penetration Testing and Metasploit both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Advanced Penetration Testing

→ Alternatives to Advanced Penetration Testing → What to read after Advanced Penetration Testing