by Kali Linux Cookbook by Willie L. Pritchett & David De Smet (2013) is a useful book. I have been using parts of Backtrack, the precursor to Kali Linux, for years, and so when Offensive Security released Kali Linux, I got the distro and started playing with it. The Kali Linux toolkit is large and varied. There are over 400 tools in the 14 major categories http://syswow.com/kali-linux/kali-menu-detail/
The Kali Linux Cookbook has six general over-arching tasks, like gathering network information, finding vulnerabilities, escalating privileges, and exploiting vulnerabilities to show management where improvements are needed. The chapters are laid out in a way that is easy to read. You do not have to read it straight through and you can jump to the part that interests you. I ran through a couple of the chapters and they were easy to follow. The authors did not make the mistake that is common in this sort of how-to book. They didn't leave out any steps that “everybody knows.” Nobody knows everything, and one of the things experts like these authors often forget is that the average person learns technology in a patchy way. We learn what we have to learn to get the job done. We would all like to go back and fill in the missing pieces. This book has filled in some of the pieces I forgot or never knew, and that is always a welcome surprise.
My only complaint about the book is that they used a white-on-black terminal emulator for their command-line images. These look ok on your computer, but they are hard to read on the ebook, especially if you print out that page to take it where you cannot have the ebook with you. It may work better in the printed version of the text.
If you are using the toolkit and want to learn more about it or you are a IT student or just want to understand Linux and Linux-based tools, you want this book. If you are a network admin and you want to add more security chops to your skill set, you want this book.