Best Web Application Security books to read for beginners in 2023

 

Books are the important role in acquiring knowledge through self-study. Cyber security has lots of books available in the offline market as well as online market. 

The main important part is to choose perfect books that provide the best information that we require. In this blog, we will look at all of the best books available in the online or offline market that will provide us useful information. Just keep in mind in this blog, I have focused on the web application security field of cyber security.

People can select any book as per their interest, and as you all know, cyber security is a broad domain. It's perfectly fine if someone is interested in another area of cyber security. I attempted to include valuable books ranging in difficulty from beginner to advanced. 

It is strongly advised that you first clear your basic concepts, such as networking, Linux command line, Windows basics, virtualisation, and web application language basics, before beginning to learn the mentioned book. 

Let's see what the five best available books are for web application security. 

1. The Web Application Hacker Handbook by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto
   
   This is the most popular book from last two decades, and some consider it the bible of web application security. This book describes every security flaw, from initial to advanced; mostly all the tactics and methodology are described in this book. 
   
   This book only have second edition, and personally, I believe it needs an update according to recent security flaws. But still, its covers most of the top OWASP web security flaws. The authors of this book have build an online learning platform, Portswigger Academy, where all new topics related to web application security are updated. 
   
   
2. Gray Hat Hacking 
   
   This is also a great book written by several writers. This books is currently having latest fourth edition and published by Mc Graw Hill publication. In this book, the author describes all the aspects of penetration testing, including tools and exploiting techniques. Also, describe SCADA attacks (industrial attacks), voice over IP attacks, and many more topics in detail.
   
   This book not only covers web application vulnerabilities, it covers lots of other fields with perfect examples and tactics.
   
   
3. Real-World Bug Hunting by Peter Yaworski
   
   This is a real book for bug hunter, only for one reason author know very well what skills and knowledge bug hunter required to learn initially. Author starts describing with basics of bug bounty knowledge and after that increased the level of bug hunting tactics with perfect examples. 
   
   Those who are interested in bug hunting highly recommended to them. Author has described all the vulnerabilities with real life examples and provide a proper description to every vulnerability.
   
   
4. Metasploit written by David Kennedy's
   
   This is the best book for those who want to master the Metasploit tool and use it for penetration testing. In this book, the author does his remarkable work work to describe the Metasploit tool, from gathering information to exploiting it using Metasploit tool.
   
   He also describes social engineering using this tool. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in mastering Metasploit. There is an entire chapter about cheat sheets at the end of this book.
   
   
5. The Hacker Playbook 2 & 3 written by Peter Kim
   
   This is a remarkable book, which describes Kerberos issues, privilege escalation attacks, password cracking, and many more topics. The good part of this book is that author describes both penetration testing tool, i.e., Burp Suite and ZAP proxy. Even so, he describe NoSQL injection, backdoor factory, and many commercial tools used in penetration testing.
   
   This book combines all of the penetration testing techniques such as web application and network compromises.

These are the best books for beginners to start their self-study in the field of cyber security. Following the completion of this book, you will be industrially prepared for positions such as penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and cyber security analyst. 

Conclusion

As I discussed initially, before learning these books, you need to have clear concept of the fundamentals of Linux, Networking, and web application programming. First, clear this step; after that you can easily understand the concept described in these books.

There are other books are available, but they cover advanced penetration testing concepts and programming concepts such as, Threat modelling (by Adam Shostack), Black hat python (by Justin Seitz), Practical Malware Analysis (by Michael Sikorski's), and many more. 

Till then keep learning and keep exploring!