Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction to the subject
Review: Copy protection schemes are to software as locks are to doors: they keep honest people out. This book provides the first insight into the science of disassembling object code for the reader who has been disinclined to search for hacker web sites and zines.
With a topic this large, the author can be forgiven for presenting only a limited set of examples: C, C++, Pascal on Windows. He shows how to use commercial tools to disassemble object code into assembler and how to identify program structures there, with particular emphasis on language features that produce non-intuitive structures.
Topics covered include: cracking passwords, identifying key structures in high level languages (the bulk of the book) and how to make your code difficult to analyse using these methods.
The structures examined include IF-THEN-ELSE, SWITCH-CASE-BREAK, objects, structures, arrays, constants, offsets and variables. The reader is shown how to recognise these objects. Explanations are complete and involve no handwaving.
A good solid introductory text.
Rating: 
Summary: Disassembling -> Debugging
Review: Excellent book from debugging point of view. Especially "Identifying Key Structures of High-Level Languages" section.
Rating:
Summary: Just use it
Review: First the good news: Very few books give a total picture of assembler code. Usually they are text books, but this is a real hands on book to learn lot of assembler structures. How does a programs laid out(executible file format), what library functions get statically linked, and how they are resolved, how does relocation works, how does loader loads etc., etc. You would find a long lasting knowledge from this book. IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM AND/OR KERNEL MODE PROGRAMMER, IT IS A MUST. But need to go thru the exercises...Bad news is that it seems like the examples are not tried out with MS visual studio 6.0. You will find the code generation is different, due to some inline library code (ie, strcmp() and others). It does have other mistakes in the programming, as well as in the text. Stack based code execution at the end of the book does not seem to do its job. But still it is an excellent book to read and go thru those examples to become fairly fluent with large assembler codes, and their working. WHEN THE INFORMATION BASE IS HUGE, LOOK FOR STRUCTURE, AVOID THE DETAIL UNTIL NEEDED, this is precisely this book follows. Nothing could be worse than ignorance, so go grab one !!!
Rating: 
Summary: Needs a revision--a little out of date
Review: First, you should probably familiar yourself with assembly programming before you read this book. It will accelerate the learning progress greatly. The first three sections of this book were great. However, I had a no luck getting SoftICE to run correctly on Windows XP. I browsed some online forums and noticed other people with the same problem. Since it appeared that the vast majority of the rest of the book relied on the use of SoftICE, I put the book down and never returned. It was also a pain getting some of these old hacker utilities the author used. I didn't even manage to get them all. Author, please put them online or give us a clue! Also, some brief examples of some Linux application alternatives would have been appreciated.
Rating:
Summary: Buy It
Review: good for research/publication and you need it as a reference, or work in the AV industry.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: I bought this book without my knowledge of the author. Its a quick read and spends the majority of the time explaining how to find programming structs in compiled code. Its aimed at windows and visual c++, and IDA Pro. With out much trouble I was able to follow along with linux, gcc, and objdump. If you are intrested in this subject, this book is a must.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly The Only Book Ever Written On Disassembly
Review: I really can't complain about the quality of this book because it is information that until now had to be gathered from dark corners of the web and by immersing yourself in hacker communities and obtaining "zines" and newsletters which were online one day and disappeared the next. Hackers out there NEED more books like this that document reverse engineering. The information itself, while extremely valuable, is very hard to follow (steep learning curve here) but that is not entirely the fault of the presentation, which is actually pretty good. This is just a tough subject. Disassembly is an art, it takes quite a bit of guesswork and experience in recognizing patterns. This book gives you a headstart on that, and is a great place to start learning the craft. I don't know why but he recommends some pretty outdated tools, like a DOS hex editor Hiew which I don't care for. The book is presented as if it is one of those "uncovered"/"exposed"/"revealed" books that must sell so well. In truth, this book is of only marginal use to someone trying to defend against disassemblers. It makes gestures towards being about "safeguarding your programming" but very little of the book is devoted to that (the last 40 pages of a 580 page book). And, I really wish the book had incorporated a discussion of the executable file format and its different pieces and parts (for this I recommend the article by Matt Pietrek titled "An In-Depth Look into the Win32 Portable Executable File Format" available somewhere online) but that was glossed over. That said, if you are doing (Intel x86) disassembly, GET this book, it is a must-have. I hope to see a second edition of this someday.
Rating:
Summary: solid introduction to reverse compilation techniques
Review: I thought this was a pretty good book. First, to the 'reviewer' (in quotes since he didnt read the book beyond the very beginning) -- very little of the book makes any use of softice. The tool mostly used is Interactive Disassembler (a commercial tool available from datarescue) but any disassembler will do.
The book is about the code typically generated by compilers of various forms (mostly c and c++, some pascal as well). If you want to understand the disassembly, you must grok what Christina Cifuentes calls idioms (instruction sequences that have an effect different than the usual intended meaning).
This book is very much a collection of idioms. It's a good primer to the art of reverse engineering, and maybe readers can move on to general decompilation papers for further study, starting with "Reverse Compilation Techniques" by Ciguentes, and moving on to more modern papers.
Rating:
Summary: It's very useful book
Review: I'm not hacker. But the book tells many useful information for everyone who work hard with computer, e-mail, Internet.
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Summary: Cracking simplified!
Review: Kris Kaspersky explains reverse engineering / cracking of softwares in such easy manner.
I purchased this book to know about debuggers/ di-assemblers etc. What an easy way to start cracking your first home made software. Worth the price!
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