// Comparison

Black Hat Go vs Black Hat Python: 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

4/52020

Go Programming For Hackers and Pentesters

Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann

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.

Intermediate

4/52021

Black Hat Python

Python Programming for Hackers and Pentesters

Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold

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.

Read this if

Offensive practitioners who already know Python (or Bash) and want a compiled-language alternative for tools that need to run as a single binary on locked-down endpoints. Go's cross-compilation and tiny runtime make it the right choice for many implant-style tools.

Working pentesters and red teamers who want to stop fighting other people's tools and start writing their own. The book that turns Python from a scripting language into an offensive multitool.

Skip this if

Beginners with no programming background. The book assumes Go familiarity at the syntax level; for the language itself, read The Go Programming Language (Donovan/Kernighan) first.

Beginners with no Python experience, or readers wanting a structured CS curriculum. Seitz and Arnold assume you can already program; the value is in offensive idioms, not language fundamentals.

Key takeaways

Go binaries cross-compile to Windows, Linux, macOS, and ARM with no toolchain pain; for offensive tools that need to land on a target, Go saves hours.
Concurrency in Go is simple enough that scanners, brute forcers, and watchdog tools become trivial to write; the book's networking chapters lean on this.
Modern offensive tooling (Cobalt Strike alternatives, Mythic agents, Sliver) is increasingly Go-native; reading this book is reading the language those projects share.

Most operational tools you use can be replaced by ~50 lines of Python that do exactly what you need; the book is a series of working examples of that thesis.
The networking, web-scraping and process-injection chapters individually pay back the cost of the book once you've used the patterns three times.
The 2nd edition (Python 3, modern libraries) is the one to buy; the first edition's Python 2 code is dated.

How they compare

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

Keep reading

Black Hat Go

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