Maxime
de Montbron

Books I'm a major bookworm. I'm currently having a lot of fun with lower level stuff reading Hacking, the Art of Exploitation (2nd Edition) by Jon Erickson. I really can't recommend this book more. It really teaches the fundamentals clearly, and covers a broad range of topics including a basic introduction to C programming, an excellent introduction to x86 assembly, binary exploitation including stack and heap overflow, networking from a low-level perspective, writing your own shellcode, a discussion on countermeasures to various exploits, and finally a chapter on cryptology. It comes with a linux live CD based on an ancient version of Ubuntu (released 2007), without all the modern protections (ASLR, stack canaries etc.) to help you practice the fundamentals of memory corruption before moving on to hacking more modern, safer systems. I initially got this book just to understand buffer overflows better as they are covered in the OSCP, but now I'm learning so many new and interesting things that I just can't put it down!

I also recommend C Programming: A Modern Approach by K.N King if you are a beginner and want to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming in C. This is essential to becoming more than just a script kiddie. Despite newer and safer languages such as rust, that prevent many dangerous bugs, modern operating systems still rely heavily on C and C++, which is memory unsafe, and has the potential for many vulnerabilities. A solid understanding of C is essential for a pentester who wants to go above and beyond copying and pasting pre-existing exploits, and hoping they work!