// Prerequisites
What to read before Black Hat Bash
If Black Hat Bash feels too steep at intermediate level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 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 Weidman02 · 2020
Black Hat Go
Tom Steele, Chris Patten, and Dan Kottmann show how to use Go's networking primitives, concurrency model, and cross-compilation to write offensive tooling that runs almost anywhere.
Intermediate4/5Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann03 · 2021
Black Hat Python
Justin Seitz and Tim Arnold's hands-on tour of writing offensive tooling in Python: network sniffers, web scrapers, GitHub-based command-and-control, screen capture, keylogging, and Volatility extensions.
Intermediate4/5Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold04 · 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. Graham05 · 2021
Bug Bounty Bootcamp
Vickie Li's pragmatic walk through the bug-bounty workflow, from picking a program and recon to reporting findings that actually pay out.
Beginner4/5Vickie Li06 · 2025
Linux Basics for Hackers
OccupyTheWeb's introduction to Linux from the angle that hackers and pentesters actually need it: shells, networking, scripting, and Kali tooling.
Beginner4/5OccupyTheWeb07 · 2019
Real-World Bug Hunting
Peter Yaworski breaks down real disclosed reports across major bug bounty programs, organized by vulnerability class, so readers can pattern-match real findings rather than learn classes from textbook examples.
Beginner4/5Peter Yaworski08 · 2011
The IDA Pro Book
Chris Eagle's deep manual on IDA Pro, the disassembler that defined a generation of reverse engineering. Useful even with Ghidra in the picture, since most malware-analysis literature still assumes IDA.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle