Gray Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers

This is a fantastic book with excellent content, and gave me a huge boost forward in a number of tasks. To be walked through hooking a browser fills you with confidence that any time you need to achieve such a task - reversing, debugging, hooking, you'll know where to start.The key problem with this book, as has been mentioned already, is it's coverage. With at title such as "Grey Hat Python", you simple could not omit tools/frameworks such as Scapy.If it were titled, and marketed as "Windows reversing and binary vulnerability analysis using python", we would've known what to expect, and would be 5-star

I am always interested in Gray Hat or even Black Hat information. And, as with any of my reviews, my philosophy is this: I'll cut a book a lot of slack if I can learn something from it. That's the point of reading a book, after all. Yes, errors here and there, yada yada can be whined about and what have you, but it's the information we are really paying for.That being said, I found this book to be a very interesting read. It took my mind to uses of Python that I had truly never considered before!It is in my opinion not for someone learning Python. Also, if you already have an understanding of some of the internals of computing, you'll get more out of the book. Worst case, though, it will show you areas where you might want to partake of further study.You are not going to learn anything "subversive" in this book. But, with what you learn in this book, and your imagination, you could certainly come up with something of that ilk.If you're into hacking ( in the broad definition of the term: to really learn everything you can about the machine, etc. ), you'll enjoy this book. If you're just looking for recipes, or "script kiddie" stuff, you'll be disappointed.I recommend the book.

I was extremely disappointed in this book. I had been waiting almost a year for the book to be released and in that time had spent time looking at the different applications that were currently written in Python that could possible be included. With the time spent in writing this book and bringing it into publication the poor quality of the book does not compare to the higher standards that most No Starch Press books have achieved.While there were a few merits in the book the majority of the book was a futile attempt to put outdated or useless information to paper. Many of my coworkers were very interested in the publication, but having read it and having spoken with my collegues that have read it we can all agree that it falls well short of anticipation.The first five chapters were about Immunity Debugger. While reading them it seemed as if it were a sales pitch and then after reading that the author was employed by the same company that produces Immunity it was plainly obvious that he was influenced.The author spent a chapter on hooking(6), DLL and code injection(7), fuzzing(8), Sulley(9), Fuzzing Windows Drivers(10), IDAPython(11), PyEMU(12) and obviously the Immunity Debugger chapters that were 1 through 5. But where was the rest? It was obviously lacking in many areas. There was very little mentioned on networks, packet reassembly or capture (pynids). No mention was made of Scapy, Pcapy, Impacket, Inguma, Volatility and so many more. Libraries that would be extremely helpful were never even brushed. IronPython, Win32, CryptoPy,The examples given were poor to say the least. The author never mentioned which versions of python that the examples worked with and they were built using the older releases. The author goes through the installation of Python 2.5, but that version had issues with a few of the examples that I managed to get to work on 2.4. No mention was made for the the Python 3 version and version 2.6 had issues with most of the examples.At 188 pages with 80+ pages used for debuggers that book was sorely lacking in any amount of substance. Most of my notes have more content then this book. To think that a book written regarding security minded use of python could only yield this little bit of information is absured.I had preordered the book well in advance of publication. Each time the book was delayed for a few months I was extremely disappointed, but continued to hold onto the preorder. Once I received the book the writing and content were so poor that I spent much of my time reading a few pages only to put it down to find something of more interest or better content.As I had said previously, No Starch Press is known for their quality products and excellent material, but this book falls well short of expectations. If someone would ask if I recommend this book I would whole heartedly tell them they are better off buying seperate books and piecing together that with internet content.With all the uses Python has in security today I feel the community needs a better resource for Python tools in pentesting, forensics, incident response, intrusion detection, and so on. The potential content could fill volumes. A book about Python and Security would benefit the community greatly if it was a quality product, but this is not it.

I was also one of the people who was eagerly awaiting the release of this book, NOT so much because I am a "hacker by day trying to pentrate systems etc", but because Python is my language of choice and I love to play / hack / hobby around with it!!The bottom line is the book is FUN to read, and opens up the minds of those programmers / hackers out their who have a PASSION this stuff ;-)This book gave me some super insight into some of the lower level things "non hackers" have probably been missing all along. We all know the best programmers in the world are hackers and I think Justin has done a wonderful job showing just how cool, EASY and FUN hacking in Python can really be!I must say I had numerous times in the book where I would smile and think "WOW, now that's cool" ;-)I must also say I am well impressed with "Immunity Debugger", another superb product that unless I had read the book, I would have never heard about...So keep up the great work Justin, and I really look forward to if you ever bring out a 2nd edition in years to come, that will be fun!Rock on!

It requires windows 32bit. Not good for windows 64bit

Full of useful ideas - completely explained but requires full concentration to keep up.

Chapter 2 was great - an overview of how CPUs, registers and debugging works. I really enjoyed this chapter.Then I turned to chapter 3.I flicked through the rest of the book. It's entirely based around Windows reverse engineering. I'm not a windows guy - I'm a Linux guy. I was expecting so much more from this book.Complete description fail. Even on the cover (same with it's Amazon description) this book only made one mention to Windows. I didn't expect the whole book to be based around Windows. What a waste of money for me.I'm incredibly disappointed. If I hadn't waited a few months to start reading the book I'd have returned it.I gave it 2 stars just because Chapter 2 was incredibly useful + enjoyable.

The book in general focuses a bit too much on Immunity Debugger and its Python features. This is pretty cool though, as I'm always thrilled to learn new things, but it leaves you nevertheless with some questions if you don't have those handy libraries available that come with Immunity Debugger. And sometimes a reverse engineer has to use what is available. I mainly bought the book in the hope that IDAPython will be discussed and indeed one chapter is dedicated to it.The author knows what he's writing about, so all in all worth its money. Something for every reverse engineer's bookshelf.*thumbs up*

Il libro è validissimo e resta una pietra miliare per tutti coloro che desiderino arrivare nel cuore dei programmi e dei microprocessori. L'autore spiega il debugging mediante la realizzazione di un debugger scritto in linguaggio Python: l'approccio è geniale. La vera pecca è che il libro è stato scritto in un periodo storico nel quale l'informatica era costituita da sistemi a 32 bit, pertanto la sua comprensione, e soprattutto l'effettiva implementazione, richiedono uno sforzo personale per l'adattamento a 64 bit (Python x64, implementazione di thread context per processori x64, etc. etc.). In definitiva, visto il pubblico a cui è destinato il libro, direi che il problema citato debba essere visto in chiave di sfida.