// Comparison

Black Hat Python vs Metasploit: 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

4/52021

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.

Intermediate

4/52025

Metasploit

The Penetration Tester's Guide

David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham

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.

Read this if

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.

Pentesters and red teamers who want to know Metasploit cold, or developers who want to extend the Framework. Written by the original project leads and updated for the current ecosystem; the canonical Metasploit text.

Skip this if

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.

Readers wanting modern post-exploitation tradecraft against well-defended targets. Metasploit shines in lab and OSCP-style scenarios; against modern EDR with kernel callbacks, the playbook is more nuanced than this book covers.

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.

Metasploit's value is workflow integration: payloads, post-exploitation modules, sessions, pivoting all wired together. The book teaches you to use the framework as a force multiplier, not as a list of exploits.
Custom modules (auxiliary, exploit, post) are how you turn Metasploit into your toolkit; the book's chapters on module development are the highest-leverage material.
The 2nd edition (2025) is updated for the modern Framework, mainstream Linux, and the current model of Meterpreter; the original 2011 edition is now dated.

How they compare

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

Keep reading

Black Hat Python

→ Alternatives to Black Hat Python → What to read after Black Hat Python