No Starch Press releases ‘The IDA Pro Book’
Posted by Dave Merten 
Aug 21, 2008 at 5:57pm
The purpose of IDA and other disassembly tools is to facilitate the understanding of programs when source code is unavailable. The IDA Pro Book explains every aspect of IDA—the most popular disassembly tool out there—and is every hacker’s guide to realizing the full potential of this potent reverse engineering tool.
Hailed by Ilfak Guilfanov, the creator of IDA Pro, as the “the most thorough and accurate IDA Pro book,” it takes readers from the basics of disassembly theory to the complexities of using IDA in real-world applications.
Written for users encountering IDA for the first time as well as those trying to take full advantage of IDA’s advanced and complex capabilities, The IDA Pro Book makes sense of this sometimes confounding tool. After covering the basics of IDA, author Chris Eagle (recent winner of the DEFCON Capture the Flag contest) moves on to cover scripting and the creation of compiled plug-ins. He then explains IDA’s capabilities and ways to extend them, as well as IDA’s practical, real-world uses.
IDA users have been waiting years for a substantial and helpful book. “If DEFCON is any indication, this book will be a huge hit with the hacker community,” said No Starch Press publisher Bill Pollock. “We rushed copies to DEFCON and sold everything we had in two hours, with half of those books claimed before we even unpacked the boxes. By the following Monday morning, we were getting emails from readers telling us how helpful they were finding the book. I haven’t seen anything like this demand in years.”
In The IDA Pro Book, readers learn how to:
• Identify known library routines, so they can focus their analysis on other areas of the code
• Extend IDA to support new processors and file types, making disassembly possible for new or obscure architectures
• Explore popular plug-ins that make writing IDA scripts easier, allow collaborative reverse engineering, and much more
• Utilize IDA’s built-in debugger to tackle obfuscated code that would defeat a stand-alone disassembler
While it will still take serious assembly skills to tackle the toughest executables, The IDA Pro Book allows program analysts everywhere to master IDA’s complexities, so that they can spend more time analyzing and less time learning to use the tool itself.
MacOSG members get a 35% discount off all O’reilly Media books. To get your discount code, just go here. Also, listen to the MacOSG Podcast, and if your member name is drawn, you can receive this book free! (see official rules) If you’re not a member yet, you can join here.
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Dave Merten
Dave was one of the founding guides at ‘The Mining Company,’ now known as About.com, in February 1998. Dave was their ‘Focus on Mac Support’ guide. In 2004 he started ‘G5 Owners Support Group,’ and in 2005, renamed it ‘Mac Owners Support Group.’ In 2006, he started the ‘MacOSG Support Corner’ column here at Macsimum News.
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