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!

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.

Wonderful resource, very helpful if you're new or seasoned.

I purchased this book as an attempt to learn more about debugging and hacking using Python.

The content itself is good. It's well organized and very clear, even for someone like me who is a self-taught programmer with ~1 year of Python experience. Perusing Chapters 2 and 3 should bring anyone up to speed on debuggers. The remaining chapters do a nice job of explaining various Python tools to use in hacking and reverse engineering.

Unfortunately, the code fragments in Chapter 3 (where you build your own debugger in Python) could best be described as a disaster. I expect a programming book's code to run without extensive tweaks. I don't need it to be the most Pythonic code in the world ... just generate the expected results. Given the importance of Chapter 3 to your understanding of a good portion of the book, these errors were a killer.

Given that the code required extensive fixes to run as intended, the errata (now on No Starch Press's website) was delayed by at least a year from publishing, and there was no forum on No Starch Press's website to pass errata around in the meantime, the book loses 2 stars.

The lesson: if you're going to publish a programming book, get the code right. Absent the ability to do so, at least support your book's readers in working around the issues.

Edit: Sorry, wanted to point out one more thing. For Chapter 3, the code on the website's source files don't always match the code walked through in the book, even on parts of the code that are fully functioning. Your best bet is to start with the code on the website and debug that.

This is a very useful book about how to establish your own debugger with python and use/learn PyDbg-Immunity debugger. I really advise the book.

One bad thing for me is the usage of operating systems. Author didn't make a systematically approach for the users of windows/unix/linux. Some examples are only for windows users, some of them are only for unix/linux... Sometimes you can get confused.

But eventually this is a good book.

An awesome book! The book gave me valuable inside about the inner workings of a debugger (Windows). This book also shed some light on the topics unknown to me (at the time) like fuzzing and introduce me to some cool python tools, scripts I did not know. I really enjoy the book it was interesting, educating and easy to read. I'd love to see Gray Hat Python II by the same author ;)

Gray Hat Python was a book recommended to me by a friend that is pretty knowledgeable in the computer security field. After the first chapter I was hooked. The instructions are straightforward and easy to follow. I recommend this book to everyone, even those like myself that are just getting started with learning Python.

Great book, I was nervous about python 2 to 3 etc... But python 3 uses most if not all the python 2 libraries now. So the only difference is really the print statement. Not worth worrying about.

great product

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*

Python aficionado...!!! get this book

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.

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