| HN Mirror

Shameless self-promotion. I have a YouTube channel where I basically try to offer a path for learning exploitation. I'm done covering all the basics, and we will soon move to more advanced stuff. I have videos on various different security topics, but here is the probably more relevant playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjxglIswKp9m...

I know your channel very well. Its praised everywhere because of such good content. I will be happy if you go through my main concern in the details and read the above discussion. Thanks again for such a wonderful channel. I'll surely learn from it when I'll cover the prereqs to understand what you're saying in those videos.

> I want to understand what are the ACTUALLY NECESSARY topics required and in RIGHT ORDER to MINIMIZE the TIME WASTING and wandering in between topics so that the knowledge aqcuired is more practical in context of current vulnerabilities rather than being more theoretical.

To be honest with you? I consider that sentence almost offensive. I hear you, but I think you have absolutely wrong expectations. You want to learn something that is not a profession like plumber where a really good expert can teach you everything you need to know with all the little tricks learned over the years. The field is sooo huge diverse and complicated that this won't work. And I think my playlist offers a rough outline that you can follow, but without going down rabbit holes left and right, and getting stuck many many times, you wont become good at it.

I understand the frustration that you don't want to "waste time" and that you are busy already. But everybody I know who is good in this field, including my own experience shows me, that nobody learns this stuff through a straight path. And everybody knows that most of the time will be spent chasing rabbits through a labyrinth and getting stuck.

Also there is no clear path. It's a complicated web you have to learn to traverse. For example like "Learn C" - what the f* does that even mean? To what extend? Hello World? Drivers? Or Operating System? "Learn assembler" - which assembler? have you looked into the Intel Instruction spec once? I doubt any human knows every instruction. Also who said that intel is the way to go, why not ARM or AVR. All of these fields offer a lifetime of studying in itself.

The "art" in becoming good at security and RE is to get a broad knowledge of a lot of things and try to simultaneously go deeper 'n deeper in all of them. And if you are interested in a specific field, put more weight on those topics.

You know how long it takes to reverse engineer something? People stare on IDA for weeks or months at a time. You can't learn RE just by reading a book or a blog. You gotta start to just doing it, and hopefully find a few blogs and people to keep up the spirit.

Why is it that K&R is referred as the greatest book on C but never recommended to a complete beginner but only seen as a reference book?

Why is it that several resources exist on buffer overflows yet we ask question on which one is better?

Why is it that you started your channel even though resources like Art of exploitation and Shellcode Handbook already exist?

Why is that there are people asking question like "computer science books you wish you had read earlier"?

Are the one who is questioning or answering is asking or telling a short-trick to become the super h4x0r?

Internet forums exist for a reason. It is always wise to take the advice of someone more experienced than you. I don't see any wrong in it.

The people who are on top are there because of a reason. The root of hacking lies in outsmarting a coder by exploiting the mistakes in his code. Now even a field like this has become a corporate profession.

But there's something that differentiates a hacker from rest of the people. I think learning from somebody else's mistakes is one of the smartest thing you can to do.

EDIT: I don't know why the edit is not updating.

"Basics of http" and "making exploits" are from next line. Thanks for bearing with me. ;)