Reversing by Doing: A hands-on reverse engineering ebook

Maker here 👋

I built Reversing by Doing because every RE tutorial I ever found failed the same way: videos show a wizard flying through a debugger at 2x speed, and textbooks make you read 200 pages of instruction encodings before you touch a binary. Neither builds the actual skill.

So this is a book where you break something in EVERY chapter — 15 lab binaries I wrote myself, in escalating order:

• your first password-check patch (Chapter 4 — free, see below)

• keygenning a serial routine

• beating anti-debug three different ways

• unpacking UPX by hand (dump, rebuild IAT, no -d allowed)

• recovering a hidden config from a custom encoder

• patching an Android APK, then beating it again with Frida only

• shipping your own triage tool in Python

Each lab ships with full source code, so you can verify your conclusions against ground truth. The toolchain is 100% free — Ghidra, x64dbg, Frida, jadx — the same tools professionals open first. No IDA license required.

Chapter 4 (the complete reversing loop in miniature) is free with no email wall, and the lab binary is right there in the repo so you can patch along as you read: https://github.com/lidongqian20/reversing-by-doing

Feedback that would help most:

1. If you work in security — does this look like a book you'd hand a new teammate?

2. If you're a beginner — is Chapter 4 doable in one sitting with zero prior reversing?

3. Anything in the launch page that's unclear or overselling: https://reversing-by-doing.pages.dev

Ask me anything about reversing, Ghidra workflows, or writing lab binaries — whether or not you buy the book.