Best Reverse Engineering books

The Hardware Hacking Handbook

Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks

Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn (NewAE / ChipWhisperer) on real hardware attacks: bus sniffing, fault injection, side-channel power analysis, and the lab work that turns a black box into a known target.

Practical Binary Analysis

Build Your Own Linux Tools for Binary Instrumentation, Analysis, and Disassembly

Dennis Andriesse on the binary toolchain you can actually script: ELF internals, dynamic taint analysis, symbolic execution and instrumentation with concrete code-along examples.

Practical Malware Analysis

The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software

Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.

Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications

Éric Filiol's reference French-language treatment of computer virology. Formal theory, infection mechanisms, offensive and defensive applications, with academic rigor rare on the topic.

Evasive Malware

A Field Guide to Detecting, Analyzing, and Defeating Advanced Threats

Kyle Cucci on the anti-analysis arms race: sandbox detection, anti-debug, anti-VM, packing, and the analyst-side tooling and tradecraft that get past those layers.

Gray Hat Hacking

The Ethical Hacker's Handbook

A multi-author breadth-first reference covering the modern offensive landscape: web, binary, hardware, IoT, mobile, cloud, and adversarial ML — the closest thing in print to a single-volume snapshot of where offensive security is.

The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 1

The Guide to Analyzing Malicious Software

Patrick Wardle's deep dive on macOS malware analysis: persistence patterns, injection techniques, anti-analysis tricks, and the macOS-specific tooling needed to triage real samples.

Rootkits and Bootkits

Reversing Modern Malware and Next Generation Threats

Matrosov, Rodionov and Bratus on persistent, deeply-embedded malware: kernel rootkits, MBR/UEFI bootkits, and the forensic techniques that surface them. Strongly Windows-internals oriented.

The Car Hacker's Handbook

A Guide for the Penetration Tester

Craig Smith's guide to automotive bus systems (CAN, LIN, FlexRay), ECUs, infotainment surfaces, and how to fuzz, trace and exploit modern vehicles.

Practical Reverse Engineering

x86, x64, ARM, Windows Kernel, Reversing Tools, and Obfuscation

A working reverser's textbook from three Microsoft / Quarkslab veterans, covering the architectures and toolchain you'll actually meet on real targets, including the Windows kernel and modern obfuscation patterns.

The IDA Pro Book

The Unofficial Guide to the World's Most Popular Disassembler

Chris Eagle's deep manual on IDA Pro, the disassembler that defined a generation of reverse engineering. Useful even with Ghidra in the picture, since most malware-analysis literature still assumes IDA.

Techniques virales avancées

Specialized follow-up to Filiol's Les virus informatiques. Dives into advanced malicious-code attack techniques and their defensive analysis.

The Shellcoder's Handbook

Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes

A foundational text on memory-corruption exploitation across Linux, Windows, Solaris and embedded targets. Pre-modern-mitigations in spirit but still the canonical introduction to the techniques the modern toolchain is built to defeat.

Hacking the Xbox

An Introduction to Reverse Engineering

Andrew "bunnie" Huang on the original Xbox: hardware modding as the entry path into reverse engineering, plus a frank account of the legal fight that followed.

The Mac Hacker's Handbook

Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi's 2009 deep dive into the Mac OS X exploit landscape — Mach-O, IPC, sandboxing as it then existed, and the early-Intel-Mac exploitation chains.