// Comparison

Hackers vs Tribe of Hackers: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Culture, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Beginner

4/52013

Au cœur de la résistance numérique

Amaelle Guiton

A journalist's investigation into the hacker culture of digital resistance — Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Telecomix, the Chaos Computer Club — and the politics of a free Internet.

Beginner

3/52019

Tribe of Hackers

Cybersecurity Advice from the Best Hackers in the World

Marcus J. Carey, Jennifer Jin

An interview anthology of practitioners answering the same set of career and craft questions, useful as a wide-angle view of how working security people actually think about the field.

Read this if

Readers interested in hacker culture, hacktivism and the politics of the net, who want reportage and interviews rather than technique. A cultural and historical complement to the technical shelf.

Newcomers and career-shifters who want a wide-angle view of how working security people actually think. The interview format pulls signal across roles (red team, blue team, IR, AppSec, leadership) without committing to any single voice.

Skip this if

Anyone seeking technical skills or current events — it's a 2013 cultural investigation, not a security manual, and the movements it covers have since evolved.

Experienced practitioners. The interviews are short and the same questions repeat; you've heard much of it at conferences. Specialists looking for technical depth should pick books in their lane instead.

Key takeaways

A rare French-language deep dive into hacktivist culture, built on first-hand interviews.
Captures a specific moment (the WikiLeaks era) in the politics of the free Internet.
Read it for culture and context, not technique — the human and political side of hacking.

The book's structure (same questions to many voices) is unusually useful for spotting consensus and disagreement; what most respondents agree on tends to be true.
Career advice in security is unusually consistent across the field: communicate, document, ship, mentor, repeat. The book makes this visible.
Diversity of voice across the panel (junior to CISO, offensive to defensive) is the value; pick interviews to match your current question, not read straight through.

How they compare

We rate Hackers higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Tribe of Hackers). For most readers, that means Hackers is the primary pick and Tribe of Hackers is a useful follow-up.

Both books target beginner-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Hackers and Tribe of Hackers both cover Culture, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Hackers

→ Alternatives to Hackers → What to read after Hackers