I am new to HTB but have managed to do some machines, I’ve heard that doing the challenges can really give me some beneficial knowledge. But when I looked at a few challenges there is 0 hints about how to go about doing something or even a place to start. I am just wondering is there certain techniques that I should use when approaching a new challenge or is it just guessing anything and everything that the challenge requires.
I have the same question, I don’t know where to get information to do the challenges 
usually challenges are more focused than boxes because there is less material to work with (maybe just a zip archive with some source code or a service on a remote host)
in the description of the challenge you can usually find some context that might reveal some hints, also the name of the challenge is more often then not a nice nice way to predict what the challenge will be about
other than that, you pretty much have to know the basic techniques for the different categories (best tools to use, best practices, things to look for)
there are hundreds of retired challenges with writeups (and even some active ones have a walkthrough) and i feel that reading through these would be a nice place to start gathering some knowledge about the specific category you are trying to approach
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Thank you very much, could you recommend material to study? Any books or sources of information to go to?
it depends on the type of challenge you want to complete, for example when approaching reversing and pwn challenges i heavily relied on LiveOverflow’s tutorial series and videos in general
also, as i said, wirteups of retired challenges are likely to have more information about the basics of the category
if you really want to learn a topic from the ground up you will have to put in some research to find nice resources
this is a website that creates a general roadmap of the steps you might take to master a topic also mentioning some useful resources
the same thing goes for books, most material is available on amazon or even as pdf if you want a free and quick option
mind that books usually require more commitment that just a video tutorial so i recommend them to get further understanding of a topic but if you are just starting then internet resources should be enough
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