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The blueprint: hacking/Python : 2 books in 1
CyberPunk Architects ., CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Charleston, SC, 2017. 150 pp. Type: Book (978-1-545444-19-1)
Date Reviewed: Aug 15 2018

This “beginner’s guide to everything you need to know”--as the authors call it--is anything but that. It seems to be randomly copy and pasted from Wikipedia and other sources, and is outdated and poorly written. What is perhaps most striking is the lack of depth. The font--24 point, double-spaced--leaves very little room for an in-depth look at hacking.

The booklet starts with basic hacking tools and a warning that “hacking isn’t easy job ... it will take you a certain number hours of computer every day [sic].” The spelling and style throughout are poor, and almost every sentence has errors like the one quoted. If this is not reason enough to skip the book, the lack of information should be. The book includes, for example, a list of popular password hacking tools, but a simple Google search will give you the same information.

The book contains no information on actually using these tools: the authors are satisfied with merely describing them. And, as the reader has come to expect by now, do so in a blissfully fact-free manner, for example, claiming that Crowbar is a tool to hack user names and passwords, whereas this tool focuses solely on secure shell (SSH) keys.

The second part of the book covers Python and is similarly high level, generic, and lazy in its coverage. The book fails to explain the various versions of Python or go over the differences between them. The authors simply provide a bulleted list of Python keywords, describe the principle of loops (without including any example Python code), and finish up with the if-else statement. In other words, other than a basic reference to some programming principles, the reader will learn next to nothing about Python, despite the title of the book.

In summary, anyone seriously interested in using Python for hacking should skip this book and pick up a solid book like Black hat Python [1], Violent Python [2], or Gray hat Python [3]. For those new to Python, there are excellent free courses online (https://www.python.org/ is a good start) and better book options [4,5].

Reviewer:  Riemer Brouwer Review #: CR146203 (1811-0553)
1) Seitz, J. Black hat Python: Python programming for hackers and pentesters. No Starch Press, San Francisco, CA, 2015.
2) O’Connor, T. J. Violent Python: a cookbook for hackers, forensic analysts, penetration testers and security engineers. Syngress, Waltham, MA, 2013.
3) Seitz, J. Gray hat Python: Python programming for hackers and reverse engineers. No Starch Press, San Francisco, CA, 2009.
4) Downey, A. B. Think Python: how to think like a computer scientist. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, 2016.
5) Beazley, D.; Jones, B. K. Python cookbook (3rd ed.). O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, 2013.
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