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