// Prerequisites
What to read before Black Hat Go
If Black Hat Go 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 · 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 · 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 Weidman03 · 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 Erickson04 · 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 Farhi05 · 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. Graham06 · 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 Li07 · 2017
Practical Packet Analysis
Chris Sanders' working manual for Wireshark, geared at troubleshooting and incident response rather than abstract protocol theory. Updated for Wireshark 2.x.
Beginner4/5Chris Sanders08 · 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 Yaworski