// Comparison
Black Hat Go 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.
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.
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
Skip this if
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.
- 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 Go higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Hacking). For most readers, that means Black Hat Go 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 Go and Hacking both cover Offensive, Tooling, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.