Press releases

The IDA Pro Book--New from No Starch Press: The Serious Hacker's Guide to the World's Most Popular Disassembler

Press release: August 21, 2008

The IDA Pro Book San Francisco, CA—The purpose of IDA and other disassembly tools is to facilitate the understanding of programs when source code is unavailable. The IDA Pro Book (No Starch Press, August 2008, 640 pages, ISBN 9781593271787) 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.

For a review copy or more information please email nostarchpr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

About the Author
Chris Eagle is a senior lecturer at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a co-author of Gray Hat Hacking and has spoken at numerous security conferences, including Black Hat, DEFCON, ToorCon, and ShmooCon.

Additional Resources
Chapter 12: "Library Recognition Using FLIRT Signatures" (PDF)
Table of contents overview
Detailed table of contents (PDF)
Index (PDF)
Large cover image
The IDA Pro Book Website

FIRST LEGO League: The Unofficial Guide The IDA Pro Book
by Chris Eagle
August 2008, 640 pp
ISBN 9781593271787, $59.95 USD
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

Available in fine bookstores everywhere, from www.oreilly.com/nostarch, or directly from No Starch Press (http://www.nostarch.com/, orders@nostarch.com, 1-800-420-7240).

About No Starch Press
Founded in 1994, No Starch Press is one of the few remaining independent computer book publishers. We publish the finest in geek entertainment—unique books on technology, with a focus on Open Source, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, and LEGO. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about. See http://www.nostarch.com/ for more information and our complete online catalog. (And most No Starch Press books use RepKover, a lay-flat binding that won't snap shut.)

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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