// Comparison

Hacking vs Penetration Testing: 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

3/52013

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.

Beginner

4/52014

Penetration Testing

A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking

Georgia Weidman

Georgia Weidman's lab-driven introduction to pentesting, walking the reader from setting up a target environment through scanning, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting.

Read this if

Learners and junior pentesters who want to stand up a safe practice lab and work through real vulnerability classes and their fixes, in French. Practical and setup-focused.

Beginners who want a single hands-on intro that walks them through a complete pentest workflow: lab setup, recon, exploitation, post-exploitation, reporting. Still the friendliest entry point in print.

Skip this if

Advanced practitioners or those wanting current cloud-era tradecraft; it's a 2013 lab-build guide, so the specific stack has aged.

Readers who already work in offensive security or want current-decade tooling specifics. The edition is dated against modern Active Directory tradecraft and EDR realities; the workflow is timeless, the tools are not.

Key takeaways

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.

A complete pentest is a small number of repeated motions (recon, find foothold, escalate, pivot, document); Weidman teaches the rhythm before the tooling.
Lab setup is half the learning; running through the book's Metasploitable-and-Windows-VM lab is what builds the muscle memory the OSCP later assumes.
Reporting matters as much as exploitation; the book is one of the few intro texts that takes the deliverable seriously.

How they compare

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

Hacking is pitched at intermediate level. Penetration Testing is pitched at beginner level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Hacking and Penetration Testing both cover Offensive, Pentesting, Tooling, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Hacking

→ Alternatives to Hacking → What to read after Hacking