// What to read next
What to read after The Hacker Playbook 3
Where to go after The Hacker Playbook 3, picked from our catalog. The next step up from intermediate level, weighted toward the topics this book covers.
01 · 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. Graham02 · 2018
Pentesting Azure Applications
Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.
Intermediate3/5Matt Burrough03 · 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 Forshaw04 · 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 Frost05 · 2007
The Shellcoder's Handbook
A foundational text on memory-corruption exploitation across Linux, Windows, Solaris and embedded targets. Pre-modern-mitigations in spirit but still the canonical introduction to the techniques the modern toolchain is built to defeat.
Advanced4/5Chris Anley, John Heasman, Felix Lindner, Gerardo Richarte06 · 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 Erickson07 · 2011
A Bug Hunter's Diary
Tobias Klein walks through seven real vulnerabilities he found and exploited, in the form of personal lab notes, what he tried, what failed, and what eventually shipped to vendors.
Intermediate4/5Tobias Klein08 · 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 Farhi