// Prerequisites
What to read before Gray Hat Hacking
If Gray Hat Hacking feels too steep at advanced level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2005
Reversing
The book that taught a generation how software actually looks once you strip away the source. Still the clearest on-ramp to thinking in assembly, even with dated tools.
Intermediate4/5Eldad Eilam02 · 2011
The IDA Pro Book
Chris Eagle's deep manual on IDA Pro, the disassembler that defined a generation of reverse engineering. Useful even with Ghidra in the picture, since most malware-analysis literature still assumes IDA.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle03 · 2009
The Mac Hacker's Handbook
Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi's 2009 deep dive into the Mac OS X exploit landscape — Mach-O, IPC, sandboxing as it then existed, and the early-Intel-Mac exploitation chains.
Advanced3/5Charlie Miller, Dino Dai Zovi04 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig05 · 2003
Hacking the Xbox
Andrew "bunnie" Huang on the original Xbox: hardware modding as the entry path into reverse engineering, plus a frank account of the legal fight that followed.
Intermediate4/5Andrew "bunnie" Huang06 · 2025
Metasploit
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.
Intermediate4/5David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham07 · 2022
Practical Social Engineering
Joe Gray's working manual for the social-engineering side of red team and threat intel: OSINT-driven recon, pretexting, phishing infrastructure, and the legal and ethical boundaries that separate professional work from criminal activity.
Intermediate4/5Joe Gray08 · 2022
Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking
The French-language reference for offensive security: a thick, lab-heavy tour of the attacker's toolkit, maintained across editions by the ACISSI collective under the motto “learn the attack to better defend.”
Intermediate4/5ACISSI