Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
(By: Jon Erickson )
If you are aspiring to become a successful professional hacker, this book is a must read for you. This book is a repository of knowledge base starting from the basic of hacking to advanced knowledge for becoming a professional hacker. The book Hacking – Art of Exploitation has beautiful and easy to understand contents that are related to technology useful for hacking.
The book contains easy to follow exercises that help you understand the art of hacking. The contents of the book are written at the conceptual level with a nice blend of deep examples of codes, which help you understand the style and techniques of hacking.
The Audience
This book is written in a way more elaborate manner and the number of pages has doubled from the first edition. This book is not a suitable for the kids on the block who play around with scripts. The author wrote this book keeping the audience who are interested in hacking and want to develop the exploits. The primary target audience of this book is the newcomer in the field of hacking. But the purview of this book is not limited to them. Anyone can read this book and keep it as repository of reference. If you have basic programing knowledge, this book is a must-have in your book shelf. The language of the book is based on C language, which is the most user friendly and basic language. The aim of this book is to create a professional hacker in you. If you are into the field of software programming and started to think about software security, this book is the gem of all hacking books.
Pros Of The Book
As mentioned earlier, the book is a repository of knowledge base. It is a beautiful book that cites many clever tricks and easy to follow exercises, which makes it a book of choice for the hackers. The easy to follow exercises in the book help the beginners to understand the art of hacking more closely and deeply so that they can implement the same in practicality. As the book is focused to cover the entire topic of hacking, it can be regarded as the Bible of hacking. The detail coverage of topic pertaining to performing buffer overflows of Linux on x86 architecture is one of the major attractions of the book. The hacking topic itself would be helpful in improving your knowledge base about internet security. The author nicely describes network hijacking techniques like TCP/IP hijacking, scanning and denial of service.
The approach or the methodology of training in the book is unparalleled too. Along with that, it also covers all the basic skills that are required in order to perform different types of overflow attacks. The topic discussed in the book also covers some of the aspects of wireless security along with WEP cracking. The way the examples are narrated in the book, it is sure to your fingers itch in order get into your computer and experiment with the programs. Another aspect of the book is that the focus of the book is not just limited to Linux. Where many books on hacking technology is based mostly on Linux systems, this book allows you to try the examples in any of the non-Linux systems as well.
Areas Of Improvement In The Book
One of the cons that the book has is the Live CD which comes bundled. The main problem is that the CD had some defects and was not functioning properly. Though many options were being chosen in the Grub, the same error was popping up and was not displaying the contents of the CD. The Scratch Press response was the only option left to try. That option was also tried – it was downloaded and the CD was burnt but that also seemed to be of no use as it did not rectify the error. Additionally, some of the examples in the book were tried in the already available Ubuntu system, however because of the general environment and GCC particulars, many of the examples were not implemented successfully.
Summary
It can be summarized from the above discussion that whether you are beginner or a mid-level hacker, this book is a must have in your collection of hacking technology books. If you can complete the book cover to cover, it is guaranteed that your knowledge base about hacking will get enhanced and you will be on your way to become an expert in this field.