// Comparison

Reversing vs Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Foundations, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Intermediate

4/52005

Reversing

Secrets of Reverse Engineering

Eldad Eilam

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.

Intermediate

4/52022

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking

Apprendre l'attaque pour mieux se défendre

ACISSI

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.”

Read this if

People who want to genuinely understand reverse engineering from first principles rather than just running a disassembler and hoping. Self-taught practitioners filling in the gaps under their tooling.

French-speaking students and aspiring pentesters who want one comprehensive offensive-security manual: reconnaissance, network and web attacks, social engineering, forensics and Metasploit, all hands-on. The closest French equivalent to the English pentest canon.

Skip this if

Anyone who wants a modern, hands-on lab course. Skip this if you expect Ghidra walkthroughs or current malware samples; the toolchain here is OllyDbg and IDA-era and the OS examples are Windows XP.

Advanced practitioners who already work in English and live in PortSwigger Academy and current tooling. The breadth means each topic is an introduction rather than a deep dive, and editions lag the fastest-moving tradecraft.

Key takeaways

Reverse engineering is a disciplined reading skill, not magic; the fundamentals of how compilers, stacks, and calling conventions work outlast any tool.
The most durable part of the book is the bridge from high-level constructs to their assembly fingerprints, which you will recognize for the rest of your career.
The Windows-internals, copy-protection, and anti-reversing material is a snapshot of 2005 and should be treated as historical context, not current practice.

The single most complete offensive-security book in French — breadth is the selling point, covering recon through forensics in one volume.
Every chapter is exercise-driven; treated as a workbook with a lab VM it teaches well, read passively it teaches little.
Multi-author and re-edited regularly, so quality is uneven chapter to chapter but currency beats most French tech books.

How they compare

Reversing and Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking are both rated 4/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

Both books target intermediate-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Reversing and Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking both cover Foundations, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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