[chc4]

Same. I learned reverse engineering by staring at CE/IDA for entirely too many hours as a kid, which means whenever someone asks me for advice on how to learn reverse engineering I don't really have any good answers :)

I think in reality it's the type of thing you do just have to try and spend some time on. The OP tutorial comes across as very sparse, both trying to cover too much and also not really teaching reverse engineering skills more than most people would be able to pick up in a few hours of messing around. beginners.re in contrast is massive, but also much more in-depth and goes step-by-step; on the other hand crackmes are probably better hands on challenges to try.

[dinobones]

Wow, did you really have access to IDA as a kid? Even with adult money it seems expensive to me.

[chc4]

Most people used a cracked old version of IDA. I actually just used the freeware version, which was ancient and didn't come with any decompiler. Which was definitely difficult, and people having access to Ghidra for free these days is definitely a lot better!

[metalcrow]

Everyone pirated IDA as a young reverse engineer, that's just a rite of passage.

[stevekemp]

Numega's SoftIce for me, but I always preferred interactive exploration over static disassembly.

Disassembling a large binary would get you a massive text file that was painful to navigate - and often times I'd find that the code I was interested in removing "Invalid license key" (ahem) would be stored in some unrelated DLL.

So for me setting breakpoints on MessageBoxEx, and similar things, was by far the quickest and easiest way to go.