// Comparison

Attacking Network Protocols vs Hacking: The Art of Exploitation: Which Should You Read?

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

Advanced

5/52017

Attacking Network Protocols

A Hacker's Guide to Capture, Analysis, and Exploitation

James Forshaw

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.

Intermediate

5/52008

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

Jon Erickson

A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.

Read this if

Anyone who needs to understand traffic, not just see it. Forshaw is the rare Project Zero veteran who can also teach; the book turns network protocol analysis into a learnable craft.

Self-taught hackers who want to understand what a stack overflow actually is, not just how to invoke msfconsole.

Skip this if

Beginners who haven't yet handled a pcap, or readers who only want HTTP/web. The book covers Layer 2 through application-level RPC, and the value compounds the deeper you go.

Readers looking for modern exploitation (ASLR, CFI, browser sandboxes). The defenses Erickson covers are now baseline, not frontiers.

Key takeaways

Capturing, parsing, and replaying traffic is one workflow, not three, and Forshaw's tooling-first framing makes that explicit.
Custom-protocol auditing (the part security curricula skip) is the part of the book that pays back hardest, especially for embedded, OT, and proprietary stacks.
The "build your own network analysis tool" chapters teach more about how protocols actually work than any number of Wireshark lessons.

Exploitation is a way of seeing programs, not a list of techniques.
Memory corruption is best learned with a debugger open beside the book.
The first half on C/assembly is worth the price even if you skip the exploits.

How they compare

Attacking Network Protocols and Hacking: The Art of Exploitation are both rated 5/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

Attacking Network Protocols is pitched at advanced level. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Attacking Network Protocols and Hacking: The Art of Exploitation both cover Networking, Offensive, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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