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