// 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 · 2024
Windows Security Internals
Forshaw takes apart the Windows security model from the SRM and access tokens up through Kerberos, with live PowerShell you can run against your own machine. The most authoritative single source on how Windows actually decides who can do what.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw03 · 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'Flynn04 · 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 Andriesse05 · 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 Forshaw06 · 2026
Hacking et Cyberdéfense
Two working pentesters who also teach the material walk through the full Active Directory kill chain, offense and defense both, in an expert-level French-language audit manual.
Advanced4/5Jacques Beirnaert-Huvelle, Guillaume Morelle07 · 2026
Practical AI Security
The founder of an AI-security firm, with a PhD in adversarial machine learning, walks from how models fail to how they're exploited to how they're defended and audited, with over 30 hands-on Python demos.
Advanced4/5Harriet Farlow08 · 2026
The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook
A hands-on tour of the full attack surface of a modern space system, from the ground stations that send commands to the flight software on the spacecraft and the satellite terminals that consume the signal.
Advanced4/5Andrzej Olchawa, Milenko Starcik09 · 2024
Evading EDR
A component-by-component teardown of how modern EDR sensors actually collect telemetry, and where each data source can be starved, blinded, or bypassed.
Advanced4/5Matt Hand10 · 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 Cucci