// Comparison

Black Hat Bash vs Hacking et Forensic: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

4/52024

Creative Scripting for Hackers and Pentesters

Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi

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.

Intermediate

4/52015

Hacking et Forensic

Développez vos propres outils en Python

Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart

A hands-on French guide to building your own offensive and forensic tools in Python — networking, packet crafting, web and forensic scripting — for people who'd rather write the tool than buy it.

Read this if

Pentesters and red teamers who land on a Linux box and need to do offensive work with whatever bash is already there. The book covers privilege escalation, lateral movement, log tampering, and the practical recipes that bash actually shines at.

French-speaking pentesters and analysts who know some Python and want to build custom tooling: sockets, scapy-style packet work, web clients and forensic scripts. Practical and project-driven.

Skip this if

Beginners with no shell-scripting fluency, or readers who only work on Windows. The book assumes you can write a basic for-loop and an if-conditional; the value is in the offensive idioms.

Complete programming beginners, or readers who want ready-made tools rather than to build them. You need basic Python comfort to get value.

Key takeaways

Most offensive bash is data plumbing: enumerate, parse, pivot, exfiltrate. The book's framing makes the workflow explicit instead of magic.
Living-off-the-land on Linux is a real strategy; bash + awk + sed + curl is often more reliable than dropping a custom binary on a hardened target.
The chapters on log tampering, persistence via cron / systemd, and privilege escalation chains are the practical core for any operator who finishes a foothold and needs to keep moving.

One of the few French books that teaches security by having you build the tools, not just run them.
Python-centric and practical: networking, packet manipulation, web and forensic scripting from scratch.
Best for the reader who already codes a little and wants to turn that into custom offensive/forensic capability.

How they compare

Black Hat Bash and Hacking et Forensic are both rated 4/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

Both books target intermediate-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Black Hat Bash and Hacking et Forensic both cover Offensive, Tooling, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Black Hat Bash

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