[awhitworth]

It's funny to see this link come up on HN, because I wrote this book (or much of it) years ago as a college student. I was taking some courses on microprocessor architectures and assembly code, and was in the middle of reading Reversing by Eldad Eilam (which had just come out at the time). I had a mantra back then that the best way to learn a subject was to try and teach it, so I wrote this and several other wikibooks as sort of a study aide for my classes. This also explains why the material appears to cover barely a semester's worth of material and why my name ("Whiteknight") doesn't appear in the edit history after graduation in 2008.

Despite the relatively thin and incomplete coverage of the material, I've heard from several people over the years who appreciated the work as a nice introduction to the topic and even once received a job offer because of it (which didn't work out, for a variety of reasons). All things considered, if I had to change anything it would be the title to make it a little more focused. It's not really a book about disassembly so much as it is an introduction to what high-level language features look like when translated into non-optimized x86 assembly code. Find me a short, catchy title that accurately describes that, and you win some kind of prize.

I doubt I'll ever get back to this book either. I haven't worked with this material at all since school, and don't feel like I have up-to-date knowledge of the subject. Unless somebody else wants to jump in and fill it out, it will probably stay the way you see it now.

I'm glad to see that this book is still around and I'm glad that people are benefiting from it in some small way. I know it doesn't cover nearly what would be needed for a real book on the subject (I do still recommend Eilam's Reversing for book-o-philes) but I think it should be a decent stepping stone to pique interest and get people moving on towards more in-depth treatments.