// Prerequisites
What to read before Practical Binary Analysis
If Practical Binary Analysis feels too steep at advanced 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 · 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 Eagle03 · 2005
Reversing
The book that taught a generation how software actually looks once you strip away the source. Still the clearest on-ramp to thinking in assembly, even with dated tools.
Intermediate4/5Eldad Eilam04 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig05 · 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 Farhi06 · 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 Kottmann07 · 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 Arnold08 · 2015
Hacking et Forensic
A hands-on French guide to building your own offensive and forensic tools in Python — networking, packet crafting, web and forensic scripting — for people who'd rather write the tool than buy it.
Intermediate4/5Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart