Tools You Will Need
This book is strongly geared toward hands-on techniques you can use to attack web applications. After reading the book, you will understand the specifics of each individual task, what it involves technically, and why it helps you detect and exploit vulnerabilities. The book is emphatically not about downloading a tool, pointing it at a target application, and believing what the tool's output tells you about the state of the application's security.
That said, you will find several tools useful, and sometimes indispensable, when performing the tasks and techniques we describe. All of these are available on the Internet. We recommend that you download and experiment with each tool as you read about it.