// Prerequisites
What to read before The IDA Pro Book
If The IDA Pro Book feels too steep at intermediate level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2020
The Ghidra Book
The reference manual for the NSA's open-source disassembler, written by the author of The IDA Pro Book. Exhaustive on the tool, thinner on the craft of reversing itself.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle, Kara Nance02 · 2009
Nmap Network Scanning
Written by Nmap's own author, this is both a gentle introduction to port scanning and the definitive reference for every flag, timing knob, and NSE script the tool ships with.
Beginner4/5Gordon Fyodor Lyon03 · 2014
Penetration Testing
Georgia Weidman's lab-driven introduction to pentesting, walking the reader from setting up a target environment through scanning, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting.
Beginner4/5Georgia Weidman04 · 2018
Practical Binary Analysis
Dennis Andriesse on the binary toolchain you can actually script: ELF internals, dynamic taint analysis, symbolic execution and instrumentation with concrete code-along examples.
Advanced5/5Dennis Andriesse05 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig06 · 2024
Black Hat Bash
Nick Aleks and Dolev Farhi on getting offensive work done with the shell: privilege escalation tooling, lateral movement, and pipelining bash with the rest of the toolkit.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi07 · 2020
Black Hat Go
Tom Steele, Chris Patten, and Dan Kottmann show how to use Go's networking primitives, concurrency model, and cross-compilation to write offensive tooling that runs almost anywhere.
Intermediate4/5Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann08 · 2021
Black Hat Python
Justin Seitz and Tim Arnold's hands-on tour of writing offensive tooling in Python: network sniffers, web scrapers, GitHub-based command-and-control, screen capture, keylogging, and Volatility extensions.
Intermediate4/5Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold