Note: For every book I read this year, I'm going to write a good old-fashioned book report about it. Since I don't have to worry about grades, it won't necessarily be anything long or detailed, but just a "I read this book" sort of thing.
I just finished Gray Hat Python. I can't remember exactly why I bought this book, but it's been lying around for at least a year. Since I'm trying to read more, I've been picking up all those books that have been "lying around" and reading them.
The book starts with a brief description of python's ctypes library, provides a crash course in x86 CPU registers, moves on to building your own Windows debugger in python, and finally moves into the realm of fuzzers and Windows exploit development. The book is pretty Windows specific, but I'm sure there are similar APIs in Linux (though I'm not sure I ever care to build my own debugger).
It's been a while since I've done any focused "low-level" work, so this book was a good refresher of the topics that I seem to have forgotten in the last few years. It also reminded me about how I got into Linux in the first place: technical mischief. I used to go to Defcon in Vegas every year, and had a good time. I liked seeing how to use python to do all these things that I used to do 5 or 10 years ago (usually using toolkits...). I had never considered using python to write a debugger or load shellcode, but having done both of those tasks as part of going through the book, I'm a lot more confident in python's flexibility now.