This is an excellent book about hacking. Includes a very well written introduction to the C programming language. The book contains very useful chapters on Networking and on Cryptology with lots of hand-on examples. I highly recommend it if you want to learn hacking techniques presented in a systematic way.
This book teaches hacking in the old sense of the word and contains the explanation that most others books don’t - and at the same time it introduces all the basic skills for performing various types of overflow attacks. Then the book also digress into some wireless security and even WEP cracking, but this part is pretty slim, not bad, just only a few pages. This is OK, since I think of this more as an example of extending the hacking into new areas and hopefully inspires more people to look into wireless security.
The best part about this book is that it is not just a book with a random Live-CD. It is an inspiration and your fingers will itch to get started trying the examples explained and experiment with the programs. This alone is the single feature that makes this book worth it, you will do the exercises and learn from them. Learn a lot.
To sum it up this books contains clever tricks and easy to follow exercises, so you can learn to apply them.
Target audience
This book is for anyone interested in hacking and developing exploits. While the primary target audience is newcomers to this field I benefitted from the thorough walkthrough of the basics once again. This book kept reminding me about things I have forgotten and also some new things and tricks I hadn’t thought of myself.