Review: RTFM Red Team Field Manual by Ben Clark with graphic treatment by Joe Vest

I would not have bitten on this had a holder of a security certification not recommended it to me, but I did like the idea of a literal, physical BOOK coming out to serve as a handy reference for one-liners and other CLI needs in a contemporary context. Back in ages past, hand typed or mimeo'd manuals were the only way to transmit such crib sheets (until books like Kirk Waingrow's "Unix Hints And Hacks" came along). I understand that such things go out of date. I also understand that they're more easily available in the portable form of a file. But books don't require batteries, and you can write in them or in back of them, and they don't set off metal detectors.

But is THIS book any good? Yes. There are nine broad categories of hints, but little more organization than that, since not much is needed. There is no narrative; these are merely convenient references. And convenient they are: it immediately made itself useful in helping me memorize common ports with a simple list at about the middle of the book under "Networking" - great for future test scores, which unfairly demand memorization of what one normally finds via search engine these days. Anyway, here are the categories:

*NIX

WINDOWS

NETWORKING

TIPS AND TRICKS

TOOL SYNTAX

WEB

DATABASES

PROGRAMMING

WIRELESS

... along with references, an index and a clever conceit of plain old typewriter font all the way through.

Now, it may be annoying to some of you that elementary matters like the meaning of passwd or man are included among more difficult listings. Indeed, I didn't expect to see, under its own heading of "Updating KALI", the ordinary apt-get update and apt-get upgrade spelled out, but that sort of thing makes the book useful to the novice as well as to the more informed. For the latter group, there's things like, under "Native Windows Port Forward", the netsh one-liners that are hard to remember. There's about 20 Cisco commands all in one place, all of which I'd have to look up. And an awk-loaded nmap idea for reverse DNS lookup, which then organizes the results for clarity. And so on.

I'm happy I bought this one; it's continuing to prove useful to fill in the blanks of stuff I should have known by now, and is presented in a familiar and un-complex paper form. 4 stars out of four.