Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Fourth Edition: Apply a proactive approach to secure your cyber infrastructure and enhance your pentesting skills

Great book for my pent testing collection! Absolutely recommended for those who know how to set up and a good computer in hand.

Firstly, Vijay Kumar Velu is a Very Passionate Information Security Practitioner Speaker Author and a Captive Writer. It is written and published in such a manner that Information in this following book can be consumed by anyone who has basic knowledge.Here in this book, he shares his knowledge about IT & CyberSecurity, where he worked for more than 10+ years. If you want to start your journey in Information Security you should definitely consider this book, This will be an excellent addition to your reading collection.

This book is absolute garbage. First and foremost, there is ZERO mention of any recommended system requirements, which is absolutely necessary considering the incredibly large lab environments the author has you set up in Chapter 1.... If you set up Kali in a VM as instructed by the author (I don't, I'm running a dual boot system), you will have FIVE VM's running! One for Kali, one for a Microsoft Server 2016 Active Directory, one for a Microsoft Exchange Server, one for a Metasploitable Windows 2008 environment, and one for a Metasploitable Ubuntu 14.04 environment. Just the first AD server is over 30GB, and if you aren't running at least 16GB of RAM, your setup might just not be able to handle it.My frustration hit its limit when trying to get the Exchange Server running. No guidance was given on recommended settings for the VM, and I had to expand its hard disk storage twice (I started at 20GB). For a virtual box I'm going to hack, this is an insane amount of space... And as I mentioned before, there are 4 VM's you need to set up to pen test (excluding the Kali VM if that's how you're running it). In addition to this, prerequisites needing to be installed were missing from the setup steps, some steps were completely missing, and in one instance, a prereq was WRONG!On the Exchange Server setup, before promoting the box to an actual exchange server, the author has you install .NET Framework 4.5 (among other prereqs). When I went to install the exchange server ISO after the prereqs, I was given an error saying that .NET Framework 4.7.1 was required, along with a number of security updates, before I could continue with the installation. I ran into another instance of this during the installation of the Mailbox role as well.All of this leaves me wondering if the exploits in this book will even work anymore. Most exploits are very specific to the versions of software and firmware installed. Since I was forced to install patches on the lab environments that are clearly not mentioned in the book itself, I have no idea if the exploits will still be valid. Given the absolute headache I had just setting up the lab environments, I have serious doubts that the theory and procedures for carrying out these exploits will be complete as well (even if they are still valid).After doing some research on Packt Publishing itself, I have found out that this is pretty much par for the company. Learning is supposed to be challenging and invigorating for your mind. It isn't supposed to leave you frustrated and dreading what's on the next page. I will be seeking a refund, and will never again purchase a product from Packt Publishing.