Some very serious work was put in writing this book. I admit I never fully read it from beginning to end, but from the parts I did read I think it is very well written.<p>My general advice for beginners who want to get into reverse engineering is to read less books, and try to actually reverse engineer small and self contained programs. Reverse engineering has been my job for many years now, but it still very difficult for me to consume a long text talking about a reverse engineering project without touching the code on my own.<p>If you are interested in a hands-on experience, I recently made a self learning kit for learning reverse engineering for beginners. It is called ReversingHero. (<a href="https://www.reversinghero.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.reversinghero.com</a>). It is one binary file made of 15 levels of increasing difficulty, teaching reverse engineering. It works in Linux environment, on the x64 series, and can also be completed using WSL (Windows subsystem for linux).<p>ReversingHero also contains an accompanying (paid) video solutions. The video solutions contain 12+ hours of step by step solutions to all the levels.
I more or less compulsively downloaded this, and started skimming it. I'm not an assembly-language programmer, but I thought I at least knew how to read an assembly listing.<p>But right there on page 8, in the MIPS and ARM "functions that return a constant", is an example of "branch delay slots", which (a) I've never heard of, and (b) failure to grok them makes a <i>two</i> <i>line</i> <i>function</i> incomprehensible.<p>Fortunately, I like learning things.
This looks like a great resource for beginners, albeit a bit dense and overwhelming.<p>If you're looking for a very gentle introduction the Lena151 video tutorials are great:
<a href="https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list.17" rel="nofollow">https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list...</a><p>They're a bit dated, but all the concepts are still relevant.<p>I wish we had all these great learning resources around when I was starting with W32Dasm + Hiew lol
Any input from beginners who have dipped their toes into this? Is the content explained fairly intuitively or in a way that is simple to understand?<p>I'm also curious - for those in the know - is the pursuit of knowledge regarding reverse engineering something that has proven valuable in a job or is it primarily an academic pursuit? If it has proven valuable, how so?
If you enjoy this format, the same author also wrote "SAT/SMT By Example" which I learned a lot from: <a href="https://yurichev.com/SAT_SMT.html" rel="nofollow">https://yurichev.com/SAT_SMT.html</a>
Science and engineering is sort of revere hacking of the world code. If you believe moral is built in, it is also a discovery and “hacking” process. Only in arts ... may be even that if you are more Plato than hacksmann