// What to read next
What to read after Penetration Testing
Where to go after Penetration Testing, picked from our catalog. The next step up from beginner level, weighted toward the topics this book covers.
01 · 2025
Metasploit
The second edition of the definitive No Starch guide to the Metasploit Framework, updated by the project's original maintainers and newer contributors for the modern Framework.
Intermediate4/5David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham02 · 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 Farhi03 · 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 Kottmann04 · 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 Arnold05 · 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.
Intermediate4/5Peter Kim06 · 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.
Intermediate3/5Matt Burrough07 · 2011
The IDA Pro Book
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.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle08 · 2008
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
Intermediate5/5Jon Erickson