trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge: a curated link index for sysadmins and pentesters

What the Book of Secret Knowledge actually is

The README opens with a description of the repository as "a collection of various materials and tools that I use every day in my work." That sentence is the whole design brief. There is no runtime, no package, no API. The repository contains a README.md, a LICENSE.md, a static/ directory, and a .github/ folder for contribution guidelines and issue templates. Everything else lives outside the repository, behind hyperlinks.

The stated audience is broad but the README narrows it: "For everyone, really," followed by the honest qualifier that it is "aimed towards System and Network administrators, DevOps, Pentesters, and Security Researchers." That is the correct frame. A frontend developer looking for a component library will find the CLI Tools and Shells chapters mildly interesting and the rest irrelevant. Someone who spends their day in a terminal, on a network, or inside a target environment will recognize most of the names and find a few they did not know.

The problem it solves is discovery. Tool lists rot, bookmarks get lost, and search results for terms like "best network scanner" return marketing pages. A single Markdown file with a table of contents and short one-line descriptions is a low-tech answer to that. It is also a fragile answer, because every entry is a pointer to someone else's repository, and pointers break.

How the chapters are organized and what the data flow looks like

The README lists main chapters in a table of contents: CLI Tools, GUI Tools, Web Tools, Systems/Services, Networks, Containers/Orchestration, Manuals/Howtos/Tutorials, Inspiring Lists, Blogs/Podcasts/Videos, Hacking/Penetration Testing, Your daily knowledge and news, Other Cheat Sheets, Shell One-liners, Shell Tricks, and Shell Functions.

Within a chapter, entries are grouped further. The CLI Tools chapter, for example, has subsections for Shells, Shell plugins, Managers, and Text editors. Each entry follows the same shape: a bolded link and a one-sentence description. Under Shells you get GNU Bash, Zsh, tclsh, bash-it, Oh My ZSH!, Oh My Fish, Starship, and powerlevel10k, each with a short line such as the description of fzf as "a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder."

The data flow is entirely manual and one-directional. A contributor edits the Markdown, opens a pull request, and the maintainer merges it. The README states the contribution rules plainly, including a diff block that reads "+ This repository is not meant to contain everything but only good quality stuff." There is no automated link checker described in the README, no CI that validates URLs, and no metadata file recording when an entry was added or last confirmed. The README does note that a URL marked with an asterisk is temporarily unavailable and asks contributors not to delete it without confirming it has permanently expired. That convention is the closest thing to link hygiene the project documents.

For updates, the README points at the GitHub commits Atom feed rather than a release channel. That is consistent with a repository that ships prose.

Getting a local copy and putting it to work

There is nothing to install. The repository is Markdown, so the practical setup is cloning it and reading it with whatever tool you already use for text. The README does not give install instructions because there is no software to install; the README itself is the artifact.

To get a local copy you can search offline, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge.git
cd the-book-of-secret-knowledge

You should end up with README.md, LICENSE.md, static/ and .github/ in the working directory. The README is the only file with the chapter content, so that is the file you open.

If you want to follow changes without polling the page, the README itself points at the commits feed. The URL the README gives for that feed is https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge/commits.atom, and opening it returns an Atom document of recent commits. That is a reasonable way to see what was added or edited, though it tells you nothing about whether the linked projects changed.

A first real use is searching the file locally. Because the whole index is one Markdown document, you can look for a topic before you go to a search engine. Open README.md in your editor and use its find function, or run a text search over the file for a phrase such as "fuzzy finder". You should see the fzf entry and any other line containing that phrase. Swap the search string for "network scanner", "container", or "one-liner" and you get the relevant chapter entries with their links. This is the workflow the format rewards: treat the README as a flat, searchable index rather than a document to read top to bottom.

Where the format breaks down

The main limitation is that the repository has no way to tell you whether an entry still works or is still maintained. The README carries one-line descriptions and links, nothing more. It does not record a last-verified date per entry, does not track upstream releases, and does not flag projects that have been abandoned. The asterisk convention for temporarily unavailable URLs is a manual annotation, so it only covers links a contributor happened to notice.

A second limitation is scope creep by chapter. The table of contents mixes tool directories (CLI Tools, GUI Tools, Web Tools) with reading material (Manuals/Howtos/Tutorials, Blogs/Podcasts/Videos) and with content that is itself a list (Inspiring Lists, Other Cheat Sheets). Those categories age at different rates. A link to the tmux wiki is likely to stay valid for years; a link to a blog post from a personal domain may disappear in months. The README treats them with the same one-line format.

The ToDo list in the README is honest about unfinished work: "Add new stuff...", "Add useful shell functions", "Add one-liners for collection tools (eg. CLI Tools)", and "Sort order in lists". The last item matters. If the sort order inside chapters is not settled, then the position of an entry is not a ranking, and you should not read it as one. Nothing in the README claims the lists are ordered by quality or popularity.

It is also the wrong tool if you want a dependency. You cannot pin a version of this repository and get reproducible tooling from it. You get a document.

How it differs from awesome lists and from a wiki

The closest alternative is the awesome-list format, and the README explicitly links to one: Awesome ZSH Plugins, described as "A list of frameworks, plugins, themes and tutorials for ZSH." The structural difference is breadth against depth. An awesome list is usually scoped to one subject, so its entries are dense and its maintenance burden is small. The Book of Secret Knowledge spans shells, file managers, networks, containers, penetration testing and cheat sheets in one file. That breadth is the point, and it is also why no single contributor can keep all of it current.

A second alternative is a project wiki or a docs site, where content is split into pages and can be edited section by section. The Book of Secret Knowledge keeps everything in one README, which has a real advantage: you can clone it, search it, and diff it locally. A wiki gives you better navigation and worse portability. The README's own ToDo item, "easy to find (simple TOC, maybe it's worth extending them?)", suggests the maintainer sees navigation as an open question rather than a solved one.

The third alternative is doing nothing and relying on your own bookmarks. That is a legitimate choice. The repository's value over a personal bookmark file is that other people contribute entries you would not have found, and that the whole thing is versioned in git so you can see what changed. The cost is that you inherit someone else's curation criteria, which the README states as three rules: "inviting and clear", "not tiring", "useful".

Licence, maintenance and what it costs to keep using it

The repository is MIT licensed, per the LICENSE.md file at the top level. For a collection of links and short descriptions, that is permissive and unsurprising: you can copy the file, fork it, and redistribute it. The MIT licence covers the repository contents. It does not cover the linked projects, which carry their own licences, and it does not cover the descriptions of those projects, which are short factual summaries. If you plan to republish the list, check the individual projects you reproduce material from. This is a description of the licence as stated in the repository, not legal advice.

Upgrade cost is close to zero in the software sense, because there is no software. There are no releases listed for the repository and the README does not describe a versioning scheme, so there is nothing to upgrade. The ongoing cost is attention: someone has to notice when a link dies or a tool is abandoned. The README's contribution rules put that work on contributors, and the asterisk convention is the mechanism for marking a link that is down but not necessarily gone. If you fork the repository for internal use, that maintenance becomes yours.

One thing the README does not document is rollback. There is no stated policy for reverting a bad entry beyond the general pull request process, and no changelog file in the top-level listing. Git history is the only record.

Who should adopt it and who should not

Adopt it if you are a system administrator, network engineer, DevOps practitioner, penetration tester or security researcher who wants a broad index of tools and references in one searchable file. The chapters that will earn their place for that reader are CLI Tools, Networks, Containers/Orchestration, Hacking/Penetration Testing, and the shell sections at the end. The one-liners and shell functions chapters are the part most likely to be directly reusable, since they are content rather than pointers.

Do not adopt it if you need a dependency, a supported library, or anything with a version contract. The repository has no releases, no package manifest, and no build. Do not adopt it as an authoritative security reference either: it links to tools and manuals, and the README makes no claim to review or endorse their correctness.

Before you rely on any entry, verify the linked project's own licence and activity, and confirm the URL resolves. The README's asterisk note is the project's own acknowledgment that links go stale. If you fork it, decide up front who owns that verification, because the repository will not do it for you.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it if you want a starting index of tools and references for systems, networking and security work, and you are willing to follow the links and verify each one yourself. Do not adopt it if you need a maintained library, a packaged tool, or anything with a version number and a changelog; the repository is Markdown plus a static/ directory, and the README does not document releases. Before relying on any entry, open the linked project, check its own licence and last activity, and confirm the URL still resolves, since the README marks some links with an asterisk for temporary unavailability. The one thing to verify first is whether the specific tool you pulled from a chapter is still the one you would choose today, because this repository points at other people's work and does not track it for you.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official README
2. Project repository