// Alternatives
Alternatives to Black Hat Go
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Black Hat Go. If Black Hat Go is the wrong fit at intermediate level, start here.
01 · 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 Arnold02 · 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. Graham03 · 2024
Black Hat Bash
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.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi04 · 2008
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
Intermediate5/5Jon Erickson05 · 2015
Hacking et Forensic
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.
Intermediate4/5Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart06 · 2013
Hacking
A hands-on French guide to building a virtual lab (Proxmox) and using it to audit application, web and system flaws — then implement countermeasures.
Intermediate3/5Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart07 · 2017
Attacking Network Protocols
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.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw08 · 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 Eagle09 · 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 Weidman10 · 2009
Nmap Network Scanning
Written by Nmap's own author, this is both a gentle introduction to port scanning and the definitive reference for every flag, timing knob, and NSE script the tool ships with.
Beginner4/5Gordon Fyodor Lyon