Books

I don’t want to write a TED talk for every book. These are just books I think are worth reading if you care about security, networking, systems, and the kind of philosophy that makes you less stupid while staring at a terminal.

Buy used if you can. Borrow if you can. Support local bookstores if they are not charging clown prices.

Mainstream

  1. The C Programming Language - Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
  2. The Linux Command Line - William Shotts
  3. How Linux Works - Brian Ward
  4. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 - W. Richard Stevens
  5. Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach - James F. Kurose, Keith W. Ross
  6. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation - Jon Erickson
  7. The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook - Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto
  8. Practical Malware Analysis - Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig
  9. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
  10. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

Niche / Domain Focused

  1. The Design of the UNIX Operating System - Maurice J. Bach
  2. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1 - W. Richard Stevens, Bill Fenner, Andrew M. Rudoff
  3. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago
  4. Designing BSD Rootkits - Joseph Kong
  5. Rootkits and Bootkits - Alex Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov, Sergey Bratus
  6. Windows Internals, Part 1 - Pavel Yosifovich, Mark E. Russinovich, David A. Solomon, Alex Ionescu
  7. The Art of Memory Forensics - Michael Hale Ligh, Andrew Case, Jamie Levy, AAron Walters
  8. The Practice of Network Security Monitoring - Richard Bejtlich
  9. Network Security Monitoring - Chris Sanders, Jason Smith
  10. Attacking Network Protocols - James Forshaw
  11. Network Algorithmics - George Varghese
  12. BPF Performance Tools - Brendan Gregg
  13. Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
  14. Threat Modeling - Adam Shostack
  15. Security Engineering - Ross Anderson
  16. The Tangled Web - Michal Zalewski
  17. The Question Concerning Technology - Martin Heidegger
  18. Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
  19. Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
  20. The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord