Customer Reviews

Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a very good introduction and instructional manual on a subject that is both relevant and shadowy. Uttering the
phrase, "reverse engineering", these days conjures up visions of crackers and other criminals breaking into websites and stealing private information. But for anyone serious about improving their programming skills, "Reversing - Secrets of Reverse Engineering" is a must read. For example, debugging and reversing activities are very close kin; you will improve your skill in tracking down and understanding bugs in your code by learning some of the techniques presented in this book.

The highlight of the book (for me) was Chapter 11 where the author presents step-by-step sessions in reversing progressively more difficult protection schemes. If you feel uncomfortable with this activity, rest assured that the author has neatly sidestepped some murky legal issues by using Internet examples created for this purpose and his own program, designed to illustrate some of the protection techniques presented in other chapters of his book. Another chapter, "Deciphering File Formats", uses this same trick by reversing an encryption program Mr. Eilam wrote for this purpose. The appendices are another valuable contribution where the discussion turns to common code patterns produced by most compilers and how to interpret and extract the last bit of information from them.

Minor nits - I wish the assembly listings were broken up to better highlight points made by the author in his discussions. It became very tedious to match addresses mentioned in his discourse with those in the listings and reduced the overall effectiveness of the material. Also, I was not able to find in the book what seemed to be bibliographical references to other works that were cited in discussions on decompilation and other
topics. But putting these small criticisms aside I highly recommend this book and wish something as comprehensive as this had been available years ago.

This is an extraordinarily didactic book. If you want jump inside this field ("secure code"), then take the book by the hand and go ahead.

Well written and very pedagogic, the book is useful even for experts. The only limitation (clearly stated in the back cover) is the full orientation toward the Microsoft's .NET platform (and of course the Windows/Intel realm).

Some chapters should be more deeply analyzed and the chapter 8 (Reversing Malware) is somewhat naive.

Even so, overall . . . 5 stars.

If you are in "secure code", this book is a MUST.

p.s. As an added value the book is so self-contained (no external sources needed) and so complete, that can be used as a quick but sufficient introduction to computer system architectures. To know more about the book try the "Search Inside" feature in this same page.

I am sorry for having written this review so late. This book is a true gem; a must-have for any serious software engineer. Understanding how software works under the hood is key to writing code properly -- and this book provides an insight on that topic in an absolutely BRILLIANT MANNER.

Having a fair bit of reverse engineering experience myself, I have found this book to be extremely concise and detaild -- and I have learned a fair bit of new material while reading it.

There is no dull moment in this book. The author (who is clearly a gifted writer) explains reverse-engineering-related topics in a fascinating and unique manner, and, within this work, he actually cements the way in which reverse engineering should always be taught. Written by a true master, the book is very pedagogic; every chapter is accompanied by detailed examples -- which make the discussed topics crystal-clear.

I would have given this book more than five stars, had I been able to -- and I can recommend it to every software deveopler without a trace of hesitation; actually, it is now that I have bought an additional copy as a gift to a friend. Rest assured that this book will be a crucial part in your collection of tech books, just like it is in mine.

To sum it all up (and as it becomes clear from the above written): I think that this book is a magnificent work of art (no less), and I would even dare to say that I enjoyed it more than any tech book I ever owned. With all the aforementioned complements and my vain attempts to describe the magnificence of this work, words still can't fully do justice to this book. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

This book is a dense collection of information about various aspects of reversing.

There are a few factual errors, and so, while this book can be used for bed-time reading, I wouldn't count on it as a reference.

Before people pounce on me for mentioning 'factual errors' and not substantiating them, let me draw their attention to the description of calling conventions in this book. This book mentions that cdecl and stdcall pass arguments in different orders (i.e left to right for cdecl and right to left for stdcall). This is just plain wrong. I wonder how this important detail could not be caught during editing, and technical review.

The authour walked you through the techniques which can be used in reverse/anti-reverse software. Most of them can be applied and used when you do your own code reverse. The book also teaches you how to protect your own application from reversing.
This book isn't just a theoritcal or academic book. You can learn the practical skills from it.

This book takes a tutorialistic approach to reverse engineering. It assumes you have a working knowledge of assembly language and C/C++. The author briefly introduces you to some of the programming languages in use, Windows Internals, gives an overview of some of the tools available, and then proceeds to walk you through some example reverse-engineering. The author spent alot of time covering Windows internals. The overview of Assembly language could have been a little more thorough before going into reverse-engineering, instead most of the appendix is devoted to this. More time introducing the debugging tools and the use of it's features instead of the brief overview would have been helpful too. Despite these shortcomings the book is very educational. If you are not up to speed on C/C++ and assembly would recommend reading Assembly Language Step-by-step: Programming with DOS and Linux (with CD-ROM) and The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) before reading this book.

I have only read about 1/3 of this book and I already know that it will be a great addition of "treasures" on my bookshelf. The author explains the material in a very clear way and also the way thing are presented to the user is very organized. Buy this book if you want to learn the techniques and how to approach the reversing problems. Do not worry too much about the technical inaccuracies mentioned by other reviewers. You can always write your own little experimental programs to verify those or if you are into reference manuals, you can always download those reference PDFs from Intel anyway. If someone like Russ Osterlund said it's a good read, you should listen.

Understanding how the compiler convert the high level language into the machine code can help you become skillful in the technique of writing good and highly optimized code. It also allow you become a better debugging specialist even if you don't become a brilliant cracker.

This book includes a great deal of effective and practical techniques related to the subject. While reading this book it soon becomes very clear that the author is a highly experienced professional in the field. He does a wonderful job presenting the many relevant topics presented in the book. If developers want to discover vulnerabilities in their own applications, this book will give some excellent pointers. Security professionals will very likely draw some great benefits from it as well. This book is loaded with information which is generally easy to read, (more so if you are familiar with some high and low level programming languages), and remains right on topic. This book is definitely a "must read!"

The book is put together very well and provides adequate explanations on the majority of everything it touches on, but if you've already been reversing for a while and want more in depth knowledge and/or advanced methods for reversing check elsewhere. For the audience it was written for, its great, if your a newbie to reversing it would be a good addition to your library.

Book has some good concepts, but most all the book is specifically for Microsoft Windows tools and techniques. I would have like more general approach for various architectures and operating systems.