Black Hat Rust: July Update
Initially planned for July 2021, the book is a little bit off schedule.
I could invoke many pretexts such as: 100% of tech projects are off schedule, COVID-19, English is not my native language, or that the weather is terrible (??)...
But I won't.
The principal reason is simple: I underestimated how hard it's to write a book, particularly a highly technical one, for engineers. Writing a book is way harder than writing a blog and waaaaaay harder than writing code. I estimate that a section that takes 15 mins to read, takes anywhere between 1 and 30 hours of work to produce: research, planning code, writing code, illustrations, writing, fact-checking, spell checking, editing, and formatting.
Now, for the good news: I'm more and more satisfied with the shape the book is taking. Here is what is done today:
- 250+ pages are available.
- ~90% of the code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/skerkour/black-hat-rust
- Most of the illustrations are drafted or good enough.
- Phaser: an automated attack surface mapper and vulnerability scanner, was extracted and improved from chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the book to help you get started: https://github.com/skerkour/phaser.
What remains to do:
- Writing chapters 5, 8, 12 and 13
- ~10% of the code
- I review and fix typos and grammatical errors approximately every two weeks: some mistakes can be found during the interval.
- Illustrations are not perfect. I made them such that they are clear to understand, but not all are beautiful, yet.
My adjusted estimates for the coming weeks:
- I expect chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14 to be mostly good by the beginning of August.
- Then I will take a few days off to rest, the past months have been crazy.
- Chapters 5, 8, 12, and 13 are planned for between mid-August and mid-September.
- From mid-September to the end of September, I will dedicate all my energy to gather feedback, fix the remaining mistakes, layout issues, and other inconveniences.
Thank you again 🙏
