Comments about oreilly Hacking:

This book does an excellent job of explain various techniques that hackers employ. The explainations include examples, source code, breakouts, and descriptions. The book progresses from basic examples to more complex by building upon a project a little at a time.

The book bascially covers 3 broad areas: programming, networking, and cryptogrophy.

Programming covers buffer overflows, stack exploits, heap overflows, polymorphic code, inline loaders and other information. Examples are presented in C and assembly. Networking covers many different exploits generally centered around the modification of packets and/or spoofing. Cryptography generally covers password based attacks.

The author has a careful approach that makes the book enjoyable to read and easy to follow. He does not jump from one step to the next without covering each step in detail. This makes the text both readable and enjoyable.

Most examples are realted to Unix or Linux but the exploits are universal. Several different tools are described and all were open source.

Highly recommended.