// Comparison

Hacking et Forensic vs The IDA Pro Book: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

4/52015

Développez vos propres outils en Python

Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart

A hands-on French guide to building your own offensive and forensic tools in Python — networking, packet crafting, web and forensic scripting — for people who'd rather write the tool than buy it.

Intermediate

4/52011

The IDA Pro Book

The Unofficial Guide to the World's Most Popular Disassembler

Chris Eagle

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.

Read this if

French-speaking pentesters and analysts who know some Python and want to build custom tooling: sockets, scapy-style packet work, web clients and forensic scripts. Practical and project-driven.

Anyone using IDA Pro daily who wants to use it well, plus reverse engineers who need to read older malware-analysis literature where IDA is assumed. The canonical IDA reference.

Skip this if

Complete programming beginners, or readers who want ready-made tools rather than to build them. You need basic Python comfort to get value.

Beginners with no RE background, or readers fully invested in Ghidra. The book pre-dates the most recent IDA versions and the post-Hex-Rays-acquisition workflow shifts; it's a reference for the core, not a current product manual.

Key takeaways

One of the few French books that teaches security by having you build the tools, not just run them.
Python-centric and practical: networking, packet manipulation, web and forensic scripting from scratch.
Best for the reader who already codes a little and wants to turn that into custom offensive/forensic capability.

IDA's analytical strength comes from how it propagates type information and renames automatically; the book's chapters on signatures and FLIRT explain why senior analysts move fast.
IDC and IDAPython scripting is the difference between using IDA and weaponising it; the scripting chapters are the highest-leverage part of the book.
The chapters on debug, plugins, and graph view turn IDA from a static tool into a workflow.

How they compare

Hacking et Forensic and The IDA Pro Book 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.

Hacking et Forensic and The IDA Pro Book both cover Tooling, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Hacking et Forensic

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