[Book Review] Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

This is a book review for Hacking: The Art of Exploitation.

As the book mentioned, hacking is the creative art of problem solving. By that spirit, anybody who tries to solve a problem beyond the original intent of the object could be consider hackers. Hacking with computers is a craft that sometimes misunderstood by many, especially after some of the portraits in media. The book takes this dense subject and breaks it down into small pieces that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject. The seven main topics includes programming,  exploitation, networking, shellcode, countermeasures, and cryptology.

The text is pretty dense because the subject is dense. As someone who is interested in the topic but do not code for food, I read the introduction to get an overview of the concept and try out a few codes, knowing where to go back to if I need it in a future date. To that extend, this books serves my purpose well. I was especially interested in chapter 4 on the topics of Networking. There are many high level tools that achieves the programs in the chapters do (Hping, Scapy) for Syn Flood, port scanning, etc. But it is very useful to see the low level code.

Overall, I think this is a great book on the topic as many have pointed out on the various book review forums.