All Things Mat

I’ve always been a C-variant kind of guy.  For Windows development (especially if i’ve needed to integrate with anything Microsoft) C# has always been my preferred choice.

A colleague was always talking about PowerShell so I decided to give it a shot.  Being completely new to the PowerShell arena, this book helped immensely.  The author starts from the basics and builds from there.  The examples were great and easy to follow, and the pace was spot on.  

Highly recommend to someone wanting to pick up PowerShell or build upon an existing foundation.  

You can snag a copy of it here.  

If you’re looking to get into the fun-filled world of penetration testing, the first thing you want to invest in is a decent lab environment.  Instant Penetration Testing goes over creating your own test lab and setting up plenty of vulnerable systems  in less than 90 pages.  

If you’re new to the pentesting arena, or need some help getting started on your lab environment, you can’t go wrong with this book—it’ll have you up and going in no time.

You can snag a copy of it here.  

I’m managed to get ahold of 3 DRM free copies of Instant Wireshark Starter by Packt Publishing.  If you’re interested, just hit the ‘Ask Me Anything’ link to the left and along with the answer to the question below, your email address (which will be passed to the publisher to cut you you eBook).  Offer expires Monday morning, 08:00.

You can read more about it here.

“What as the original name for Wireshark?”

Instant Burp Suite Starter is my third book in Pact’s Instant series.  As you can imagine it covers my favorite web proxy shenanigans tool, Burp Suite.  This book covers all of the basics you would need to know in order to get up and going with Burp Suite as well as cover 8 key uses of the tool.  That being said, the only problem i had with this book is the use of Burp’s scanner feature (Pro Only).  

Aside from that (read:  me being cheap), this was a great introduction to Burp Suite. 

Recommended for anyone new or doing web application (penetration) testing.

You can snag a copy of it here.

You can download Burp Suite here.

Next in line in Pack’s Instant series was for Netcat— one of my favorite little toys. This quick little read goes into the basics of setting up listeners, making connections, transferring files, and even executing shells. 

For someone new to netcat, I would highly recommend this book.  It’s extremely short (48 pages) and teaches a solid foundation of the tool. 

You can read more about it here.

The “Instant’ Series of books by Packt are relatively new and are designed to be a crash course on a particular technology.  In this instance, I chose my favorite network analysis tool, Wireshark.   

First and foremost, it’s a QUICK read.  At a commanding 68 pages, you can easily get through this in an hour or so. The book covers the basics from installing and getting familiar with the basics, navigating the GUI, using some of the command line tools, and at the end there’s  interesting little exercise pertaining to the BlackHole Exploit Kit.

Overall, a good (and quick) read.  Recommended for people who are new to network analysis and the Wireshark tool.  

You can read more about it here.

You can read more about Wireshark here.

A handy little book containing 80 different recipes for practical scenarios encountered during a penetration test. Overall, not a bad little book and makes a great reference during an engagement.  My only real complaint is that there’s about two chapters wasted on installing and configuring BackTrack—which is covered in multiple beginners books.  I would have rather had two more chapters on real-content.  

Overall, a great book to have on hand.

You can read more about it and get it here.

A great introduction to iOS and application development for Apple platforms.  Although targeted to the beginner and intermediate crowd, it still manages to deliver a great foundation into iOS development.  Examples were well explained and for the most part, error free.  I’d recommend this book for anyone looking to get into development with Cocoa & Objective-C.

You can read more about it here.