// Prerequisites
What to read before The Mac Hacker's Handbook
If The Mac Hacker's Handbook feels too steep at advanced level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2011
The IDA Pro Book
Chris Eagle's deep manual on IDA Pro, the disassembler that defined a generation of reverse engineering. Useful even with Ghidra in the picture, since most malware-analysis literature still assumes IDA.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle02 · 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 Frost03 · 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 Wardle04 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig05 · 2003
Hacking the Xbox
Andrew "bunnie" Huang on the original Xbox: hardware modding as the entry path into reverse engineering, plus a frank account of the legal fight that followed.
Intermediate4/5Andrew "bunnie" Huang06 · 2016
The Car Hacker's Handbook
Craig Smith's guide to automotive bus systems (CAN, LIN, FlexRay), ECUs, infotainment surfaces, and how to fuzz, trace and exploit modern vehicles.
Intermediate4/5Craig Smith07 · 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 Filiol08 · 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 Andriesse