// Comparison
Hacking vs The Hacker Playbook 3: Which Should You Read?
Two cybersecurity books on Offensive, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.
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.
Practical Guide to Penetration Testing — Red Team Edition
Peter Kim
Peter Kim's hands-on red-team field manual: assumed-breach scenarios, lateral movement, AV/EDR evasion, and the operational rhythm of a real engagement rather than a checklist of CVEs.
Read this if
Skip this if
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.
- Assumed breach is the right starting frame for almost any modern engagement; perimeter-to-DA scenarios are increasingly fiction.
- The book's value is the workflow — recon, foothold, escalate, persist, exfil — not the specific tools used to demonstrate it.
- Pair every chapter with a current blog source; the toolchain rotates faster than print can track.
How they compare
We rate The Hacker Playbook 3 higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Hacking). For most readers, that means The Hacker Playbook 3 is the primary pick and Hacking is a useful follow-up.
Both books target intermediate-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.
Hacking and The Hacker Playbook 3 both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.