I'm the same as you. I got this book:

https://www.amazon.ca/Hacking-Art-Exploitation-Jon-Erickson/...

Which I've dabbled in, and haven't gotten further than what I already know from my CS education, but the consensus seems to be it's a good book to learn from.

>won't you just pick up the Intel reference manual and flick through it?

The Intel reference manual is incredibly bloated and dry reading. Yeah, it has literally everything you would want to know. But good luck trying to understand all of it in a reasonable amount of time.

I learned x86 while studying buffer overflows in college. We used Hacking: The Art of Exploitation which walked us through most of the core concepts really well.

https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Art-Exploitation-Jon-Erickson...

I would really suggest purchasing a good book about it. From my point of view, I would go for "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition" from Jon Erickson which goes in depth about how to crack programs using gdb and other tools. It's really a wonderful book if you want to learn more about the world of cracking in general, and it doesn't require much prior security experience.

Quick link to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d...

Read this book, it's basically only hacking C code with assembly. http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d... It also covers topics such as TCP sockets and the likes. If you ever want to become a real hacker it's your best starting point.

And the world was never the same again.

I'm a network security analyst. Either of these two books would be a good place to start. Also, if you are looking for a decent community for this type of thing, visit reddit.com/r/netsec.

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition

http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d...

Hacking Exposed 7

http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Exposed-Network-Security-Solut...

This next site is basically Youtube for security conferences. They also offer some online courses on writing exploits in assembly and python, but not all of them are free.

http://www.securitytube.net/

Computer security is just like programming, you can obtain a world class education for free, from the Internet. You just have to know where to look.

I haven't read the books that the other guys mentioned, but I've seen them recommended so often that I'd bet they're worth a read as well.

We mean hacker in the pg (http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html) esr (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) sense of the word, namely an awesome programmer who loves learning, groks hacker culture, and self identifies as a hacker. Not a cracker. Certainly learning about computer security is part of being a good hacker, but it's not primarily what Hacker School is about.

Incidentally, have you ever read Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d...)? It's my favorite book on the subject.