Rating: ★★★★☆ (4 of 5 stars)
“The Hacker Playbook 3: Practical Guide To Penetration Testing” is a great book, but in my opinion does not deserve 5/5 stars. The book adresses people who already have some experience with cyersecurity and is not suited for beginners. I liked the practical part of the book, even though VirtualBox was not supported and required some tweaks in order to run the provided images.
Here and there knowledge of concepts was assumed, that I have never heard of - especially concepts of the Windows world. That is the reason why I had the feeling that the focus of the book was a little strange. I missed the focus on the security concepts instead of focussing on implementation details. Additionally some abbreviations were misplaced or at least not familiar to me and therefore heavily disturbed my reading flow.
On the good handside I learned a lot about TTP (Tools, Techniques and Procedures, one example of the previously mentioned abbreviations) used in the red team and also about the lateral movement within the target network.
I would recommend the book to security interested persons but not without hesitation.