If you find binary reverse engineering fascinating and want to go deeper into the formal aspects checkout http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/smf4u/re... and https://github.com/turnersr/turnersr.github.io/blob/master/t... .

This is a really great list but it missed hooking libraries/tools. A good thread about alternatives is also on the reverse engineering subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/22crn0/gpl_alte...

Disclaimer: my company does one of the tools being discussed.

Also useful for RE beginners: https://microcorruption.com/

If I'm interested in reverse engineering, but at a higher abstraction than this book - let's say there is a game client communicating with server and I want to understand what the format of the packet is (ie. application level rather than all the way down) - does the question make any sense? And where could I find material for it?

Wireshark, Deep Packet Inspection and similar might be terms you can look after to find out more. RFCs are what you need to understand the protocols (if they are public standards)

A lot of paper and a lot of colored pencils. Start printing out network dumps of various game states and tracing out the fields in the packets.

This is an amazingly in-depth and up-to-date walkthrough. Way better than CS61. But...

> "for Beginners"

> links to GitHub repo full of .tex files

O:

Agreed. For anyone wanting to know what these files are, they're LaTeX; text files mixed with meta information.

Detailed explanation of LaTeX: http://latex-project.org/intro.html Software to work with LaTeX: http://latex-project.org/ftp.html

Well, the readme links to a PDF.

I thought linking to the source rather than to just the pdf would be more useful for you, as a) some might like to actually contribute and b) many would like to know what else the author made and lastly c) a minority of people isn't allowed to open pdf's from the internet, so they could build it locally (or just starr on github).

I always enjoyed this page (pretty old and more of a hackme featuring reverse engineering stuff):

http://3564020356.org/

The hash maze is pretty interesting.

Good old times :)

Ouch, bad time for GitHub to go down. Here is Google's cache:

http://cl.ly/2i150V3c450i

Here is also links to PDF files: http://yurichev.com/RE-book.html

It looks like a good resource from a very quick skim of the document. It is a shame, however, that the English may not be too polished.

You can always make a pull request.

Apart from working out which .tex file corresponds to which piece of text, the files are tricky to read because they contain both english and russian strings delimited by some kind of macro.

Any hints on editing this?

Well, it's possible to grep these files :) See also: https://github.com/dennis714/RE-for-beginners/blob/master/CO...

For anyone reading this at the time of this post, GitHub is down.

Why do you write a 600 page book and offer it for free?

Why do you write [an entire kernel, an operating system, an RDBMS, a web application framework, ...] and offer it for free? Sometimes, the journey of creation and the sharing are more important than any remuneration you might otherwise get.

I hope he publishes a print version of the finished book, like Miran Lipovača did with Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! If someone releases a free book that has immense value to me, I'm more than willing to support them by buying a wonderful print version. There's something wonderful about having the ergonomics of a print book, combined with the ability to copy and paste and follow links from a PDF...

Yes, I'll signup with service like lulu.com in future, for those who want hardback, when I'll feel I finish the thing, maybe 1-2 years later.

http://blog.yurichev.com/node/80 I think it's a work in progress.

Well, I've got nothing close to a 600 page book, but I offer a number of smaller documents at the website for my side business, plus some software and other design tools. If I have any ulterior motive, it's that those materials give me some technical credibility and maybe generate a bit of goodwill.

Has it helped? Over the years, it's gotten me a little bit of "buzz" on web forums, and has attracted a couple of people who wanted me to do custom work for them. Also, in a manner akin to OSS, a couple people have been kind enough to report mistakes in my documents.