Practical Foundations of Windows Debugging, Disassembling, Reversing, Third Edition
Practical Foundations of Windows Debugging, Disassembling, Reversing, Third Edition
Training Course
About the Book
This training course is a reformatted, improved, and modernized version of the previous x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations book, which drew inspiration from the original lectures we developed 22 years ago to train support and escalation engineers in debugging and crash dump analysis of memory dumps from Windows applications, services, and systems. At that time, when thinking about what material to deliver, we realized that a solid understanding of fundamentals like pointers is needed to analyze stack traces beyond a few WinDbg commands. Therefore, this book is not about bugs or debugging techniques but about the background knowledge everyone needs to start experimenting with WinDbg, learn from practical experience, and read other advanced debugging books. This body of knowledge is what the author of this book possessed before starting memory dump analysis using WinDbg 18 years ago, which resulted in the number one debugging bestseller: the multi-volume Memory Dump Analysis Anthology (Diagnomicon). Now, in retrospection, we see these practical foundations as relevant and necessary to acquire for beginners as they were more than 20 years ago, because operating systems internals, assembly language, and compiler architecture haven't changed much in those years.
The third edition, with new material on arrays and floating point, was completely remastered in full color. The text was also reviewed, and a few previous mistakes were corrected. The book is also slimmer because the x86 32-bit chapters were removed. They are still available in the previous edition, which will not be out of print soon. The third edition is entirely x64.
The book is useful for:
- Software technical support and escalation engineers
- Software engineers coming from a managed code or JVM background
- Software testers
- Engineers coming from non-Wintel environments
- Windows C/C++ software engineers without an assembly language background
- Security researchers without an x64 assembly language background
- Beginners learning Windows software reverse engineering techniques
This introductory training course can complement the more advanced Accelerated Disassembly, Reconstruction, and Reversing course. It may also help with advanced exercises in Accelerated Windows Memory Dump Analysis, Accelerated Rust Windows Memory Dump Analysis, Accelerated Windows Debugging 4D, Accelerated Windows API for Software Diagnostics, Accelerated Windows Malware Analysis with Memory Dumps, and Memory Thinking books for C and C++. This book can also be used as an Intel assembly language and Windows debugging supplement for relevant undergraduate-level courses.
About the Author
Table of Contents
Contents 4
Preface to the Third Edition 9
Preface to the Second Edition 10
Preface to the First Edition 11
Combined Preface from Original Editions 12
About the Author 13
Chapter 1: Memory, Registers, and Simple Arithmetic 14
Chapter 2: Debug and Release Binaries 29
Chapter 3: Number Representations 45
Chapter 4: Pointers 49
Chapter 5: Bytes, Words, Double Words, and Quad Words 68
Chapter 6: Pointers to Memory 73
Chapter 7: Logical Instructions and RIP 91
Chapter 8: Reconstructing a Program with Pointers 99
Chapter 9: Memory and Stacks 109
Chapter 10: Local Variables 128
Chapter 11: Function Parameters 137
Chapter 12: More Instructions 147
Chapter 13: Function Pointer Parameters 158
Chapter 14: Arrays 162
Chapter 15: Floating Point 168
Chapter 16: Summary of Code Disassembly Patterns 172
References and Follow-up Courses 178
Other books by this author
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