// the find
trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge
A collection of inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more.
A giant link dump of CLI tools, security tools, cheatsheets, and resources aimed at sysadmins, DevOps engineers, and pentesters. It's essentially one enormous README with no code of its own — just categorized links to other projects. 235k stars is a testament to how much developers want a single place to find this stuff.
The breadth is genuinely useful — network, SSL, DNS, logging, databases, and security auditing are all covered with specific tool recommendations rather than vague categories. The security and pentesting sections go beyond the obvious (nmap, wireshark) into tools most developers won't have heard of. Organization is clear enough that you can scan a section quickly without reading the whole thing. The RSS feed tip for tracking updates is a nice practical touch.
No code here at all — this is a bookmark collection, not a project. Link rot is a real problem at this scale; the README itself flags URLs with asterisks as 'temporarily unavailable' but the last push was late 2024, so who knows what's dead now. Curation quality is uneven: some sections are thorough, others have two entries. There's no indication of which tools are actively maintained vs abandoned, which matters a lot for security tooling.