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> Think about it for a couple of minutes: teaching yourself a bunch of exploits and how to use them means you're investing your time in learning a bunch of tools and techniques that are going to go stale as soon as everyone has patched that particular hole.

No, it means that you learn practical aspects alongside theory, and that's very useful.

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I also took issue with this point. One does not become an author without first learning how to read. The usefulness of reading has not diminished once you publish a book.

You must learn how known exploits work to be able to discover unknown exploits. When the known exploits are patched, your knowledge of how they occurred has not diminished. You may not be able to use them anymore, but surely that was not the goal in learning them.

Not necessarily.

There are a lot of script kiddies that don't know a damn thing about what TCP is or what an HTTP request looks like, but know how to use LOIC to take down a site.

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