// Alternatives
Alternatives to The Shellcoder's Handbook
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to The Shellcoder's Handbook. If The Shellcoder's Handbook is the wrong fit at advanced level, start here.
01 · 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 Erickson02 · 2021
The Hardware Hacking Handbook
Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn (NewAE / ChipWhisperer) on real hardware attacks: bus sniffing, fault injection, side-channel power analysis, and the lab work that turns a black box into a known target.
Advanced5/5Jasper van Woudenberg, Colin O'Flynn03 · 2018
Practical Binary Analysis
Dennis Andriesse on the binary toolchain you can actually script: ELF internals, dynamic taint analysis, symbolic execution and instrumentation with concrete code-along examples.
Advanced5/5Dennis Andriesse04 · 2017
Attacking Network Protocols
James Forshaw, Project Zero veteran, on how to capture, parse, and break protocols from the wire up to the application layer, with a strong focus on building reusable analysis tooling.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw05 · 2024
Evasive Malware
Kyle Cucci on the anti-analysis arms race: sandbox detection, anti-debug, anti-VM, packing, and the analyst-side tooling and tradecraft that get past those layers.
Advanced4/5Kyle Cucci06 · 2009
Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications
Éric Filiol's reference French-language treatment of computer virology. Formal theory, infection mechanisms, offensive and defensive applications, with academic rigor rare on the topic.
Advanced5/5Éric Filiol07 · 2022
Gray Hat Hacking
A multi-author breadth-first reference covering the modern offensive landscape: web, binary, hardware, IoT, mobile, cloud, and adversarial ML — the closest thing in print to a single-volume snapshot of where offensive security is.
Advanced4/5Allen Harper, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims, Michael Baucom, Daniel Fernandez, Huascar Tejeda, Moses Frost08 · 2022
The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 1
Patrick Wardle's deep dive on macOS malware analysis: persistence patterns, injection techniques, anti-analysis tricks, and the macOS-specific tooling needed to triage real samples.
Advanced4/5Patrick Wardle09 · 2019
Rootkits and Bootkits
Matrosov, Rodionov and Bratus on persistent, deeply-embedded malware: kernel rootkits, MBR/UEFI bootkits, and the forensic techniques that surface them. Strongly Windows-internals oriented.
Advanced4/5Alex Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov, Sergey Bratus10 · 2014
Practical Reverse Engineering
A working reverser's textbook from three Microsoft / Quarkslab veterans, covering the architectures and toolchain you'll actually meet on real targets, including the Windows kernel and modern obfuscation patterns.
Advanced4/5Bruce Dang, Alexandre Gazet, Elias Bachaalany