// Alternatives
Alternatives to Real-World Bug Hunting
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Real-World Bug Hunting. If Real-World Bug Hunting is the wrong fit at beginner level, start here.
01 · 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.
Beginner4/5Vickie Li02 · 2023
Black Hat GraphQL
Aleks and Farhi on attacking GraphQL specifically: introspection abuse, batching, depth and complexity attacks, auth flaws, and the differences from REST that make GraphQL pentests their own discipline.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi03 · 2022
Hacking APIs
Corey Ball's structured approach to attacking REST and GraphQL APIs: enumeration, auth flaws, business logic, mass assignment, and the testing harness around them.
Intermediate4/5Corey J. Ball04 · 2011
The Web Application Hacker's Handbook
The exhaustive reference for web app pentesting, comprehensive but increasingly a historical document.
Intermediate4/5Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto05 · 2020
Web Security for Developers
Malcolm McDonald's developer-side primer on the OWASP-class issues, framed around real attacks and defended with code patterns rather than vendor products.
Beginner4/5Malcolm McDonald06 · 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 Weidman07 · 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. Graham08 · 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 Farhi09 · 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 Erickson10 · 2022
Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking
The French-language reference for offensive security: a thick, lab-heavy tour of the attacker's toolkit, maintained across editions by the ACISSI collective under the motto “learn the attack to better defend.”
Intermediate4/5ACISSI