Recommended Reading

This page lists some good books recommended by current and past students for a variety of subjects related to the degree. Feel free to add books as you read them if they are relevant!

General Security

• Red Team Field Manual – Ben Clark (2014)

• Blue Team Field Manual – Alan J White, Ben Clark (2017)

• Network Security Assessment Third Edition – Chris McNab (2016)

• Hacking: The Art of Exploitation - John Erickson (2008)

• The Hacker Playbook 2 - Peter Kim (2015)

• Grey Hat Hacking (Fourth Edition) - Daniel Regalado, Shon Harris, Allen Harper, Chris Eagle, Jonathon Ness, Branko Spasojevic, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims (2015)

Web App Hacking

• Web App Hackers Handbook Second Edition – Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto (2011)

• SQL Injection Attacks and Defense - Justin Clarke-Salt (2012)

• The Tangled Web - A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications - Michal Zalewski (2011)

Mobile App Security

• Mobile Hackers Handbook - Dominic Chell, Tyrone Erasmus, Shaun Colley, Ollie Whitehouse (2015)

• iOS Application Security - David Thiel (2016)

Python Programming

• Black Hat Python – Justin Seitz (2014)
• Learn Python The Hard Way - Zed A. Shaw (2013)
• Violent Python - T.J. O'Connor (2012)

Java Programming

• Mr Bunny’s Big Cup o’ Java – Carlton Egremont III (1999)

C Programming

• Learn C The Hard Way – Zed A. Shaw (2015)
• The C Programming Language - Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (1988)
• Deep C Secrets- Peter Van Der Linden (1994)

Powershell

• Learn Windows Powershell in a Month of Lunches (Third Edition) - Donald W. Jones, Jeffrey D. Hicks (2017)

Malware Analysis/Reverse Engineering

• Practical Malware Analysis – Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig (2012)
• Art of Software Security Assessment - Mark Dowd, John McDonald, Justin Schuh (2006)
• The Shellcoders Handbook - Chris Anley, John Heasman, Felix Lindner, Gerardo Richarte (2007)
• Learning Linux Binary Analysis - Ryan O'Neill (2016)
• The Ghidra Book - Chris Eagle, Kara Nance (2021)
• Malware Reverse Engineering Handbook - Ahmet Balci, Dan Ungureanu, Jaromír Vondruška (2020)

Digital Forensics

• Windows Forensics Analysis Toolkit (Windows 7) - Harlan Carvey (2012)
• Windows Forensics Analysis Toolkit (Windows 8) - Harlan Carvey (2014)
• Windows Registry Forensics - Harlan Carvey (2011)

Networking

• Looking for recommendations for this section

Misc

• Infrastructure as Code - Keif Morris (2016)
• There's an entire series of books 'Hacking Exposed' for a whole lot of topics, I'm too lazy to add them all manually

Operating Systems

Linux

• Linux Pocket Book - Daniel Barrett (2016)
• The Linux Command Line - William Shotts (2019)
• How Linux Works - Brian Ward (2014)
• Linux Basics for Hackers - OccupyTheWeb (2018)
• Kali Linux Revealed - Raphaël Hertzog, Mati Ahroni, Jim O'Gorman (2017)

macOS & iOS

• MacOS and iOS Internals, Volume I - User Mode - Jonathan Levin (Amazon) (2017)
• MacOS and iOS Internals, Volume III: Security & Insecurity - Jonathan Levin (Amazon) (2016)