Learning from experience

The lessons you learn while pentesting are among the most valuable resources you will gain during your time as a pentester. Whether you make a career out of it or do it as a side hobby, the lessons learned involve using the knowledge you have gained from experiences, both professional and personal, and applying them to your future endeavors.

Using hindsight to look at your pentesting endeavors allows you to view your mistakes and take those mistakes as a learning experience rather than a harsh failure. It's about failing forward, not failing backward, which will ensure your growth in the knowledge of pentesting. Often, this is what makes or breaks professionals and hobbyists in the pentesting community.

For this book, it's important to understand the lessons learned will require you to review material maybe more than once, or you may need to go back and try to do something a different way because it seems more suitable to you, or perhaps you...