Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (ISBN 1593270070)

One of the best technical books I have ever read.:
One of the best technical books I have ever read. Starts simple and ramps up very fast building on material already presented. Goes in detail in showing many different "low level" exploitation techniques. I.e. buffer overflow, format string abuse, etc.

Excellent:
Hacking, 2nd edition features an extensive overview of C and x86 Assembly, Linux, and slowly steps through major functions of GDB. It's a bad idea to read this book without a Linux distro at hand, but thankfully one is included. I'd buy this again in a heartbeat.

2nd Edition Much Better than 1st:
The first edition of this book seemed to be written in code (hexadecimal), but the second effort explains the common software vulnerabilities much more clearly.

Get your hands dirty:
This is an excellent book about hacking. Includes a very well written introduction to the C programming language. The book contains very useful chapters on Networking and on Cryptology with lots of hand-on examples. I highly recommend it if you want to learn hacking techniques presented in a systematic way. Buy this book.

Excellent security book:
I found the book a pleasure to read. The book explains the fundamental concepts of hacking very well. The treatment of exploits like buffer overflow, format string vulnurabilty is very good. The chapters on networking, shellcode are also very good. All throughout the book every concept is explained by extensive source codes (with clear accompanying commentary). All in all this is a great book to start learning the concepts of hacking and security.