Cyber Shelf

// Prerequisites

What to read before Metasploit

If Metasploit 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.

OffensiveToolingPentesting

  1. 01 · 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.

    Beginner
    4/5Georgia Weidman

  2. 02 · 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.

    Intermediate
    4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi

  3. 03 · 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.

    Intermediate
    4/5Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann

  4. 04 · 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.

    Intermediate
    4/5Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold

  5. 05 · 2018

    The Hacker Playbook 3

    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.

    Intermediate
    4/5Peter Kim

  6. 06 · 2018

    Pentesting Azure Applications

    Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.

    Intermediate
    3/5Matt Burrough

  7. 07 · 2021

    Bug Bounty Bootcamp

    Vickie Li's pragmatic walk through the bug-bounty workflow, from picking a program and recon to reporting findings that actually pay out.

    Beginner
    4/5Vickie Li

  8. 08 · 2025

    Linux Basics for Hackers

    OccupyTheWeb's introduction to Linux from the angle that hackers and pentesters actually need it: shells, networking, scripting, and Kali tooling.

    Beginner
    4/5OccupyTheWeb
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