// Comparison

Black Hat Bash vs Hacking: 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

3/52013

Hacking

Un labo virtuel pour auditer et mettre en place des contre-mesures

Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart

A hands-on French guide to building a virtual lab (Proxmox) and using it to audit application, web and system flaws — then implement countermeasures.

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.

Learners and junior pentesters who want to stand up a safe practice lab and work through real vulnerability classes and their fixes, in French. Practical and setup-focused.

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.

Advanced practitioners or those wanting current cloud-era tradecraft; it's a 2013 lab-build guide, so the specific stack has aged.

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.

A practical French guide to building your own vulnerability lab and auditing it end to end.
Covers application, web and system flaws with the matching countermeasures — attack and defence together.
From 2013: the method holds, but expect to modernise the specific tools and lab stack.

How they compare

We rate Black Hat Bash higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Hacking). For most readers, that means Black Hat Bash is the primary pick and Hacking is a useful follow-up.

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

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

Keep reading

Black Hat Bash

→ Alternatives to Black Hat Bash → What to read after Black Hat Bash