Since we're judging each other, I'm genuinely wondering how bad you are at making friends. I mean, non-LLM friends. Relatives don't count.

God forbid someone pose an interesting question on a discussion board.

How interesting.

Anyway, I would recommend YouTube. Find a series you can follow along. Best of luck!

You were rude but I understand what you mean. People can obviously Google "reverse engineering tutorial" or something similar. And certainly "what are good resources for X" can be a way to signal interest in something, get people to respond, and not necessarily do anything about it. But I think the most charitable interpretation of that question is they want a group consensus for the best place to start, since Google might return a heavily promoted site that had deprecated info. I remember years ago people hated "cplusplus.com" because out of a volume that is the size of a textbook, it had a few bad examples. So instead they promoted cppreference. (For learning C++).

I think we should conclude people want to maximize learning while minimizing wasted time, hence they ask for the "best resources". Even though the question seems tiring at times (when I was on reddit I heard this constantly, and cynically projected that very few people actually used the resources they requested. But I solved this problem by quitting/getting banned from Reddit and never looked back).

I often wonder why on this forum of alleged hacker types, there seems to be such an impetus to push what all VC's are desperately bought into at the moment, whether it be crypto, or AI nonsense.

Oh wait... Right.

Asking for resources or asking "does anyone know where I can start?" Followed by a description of "here's where I'm at" has been table stakes for the uninitiated since time immemorial.

When I see "ask the LLM", all I hear is "prop up my investment portfolio".

To this OP in particular: try playing around with different binaries you already have source to, and using the RE tools to get a feel for their post compilation structure and flow; start by compiling with no compiler optimization. You'll want an understanding of what the structural primitives of "nothing up my sleeve" code reads and looks like post-compilation to build off of. Then start enabling different layers of optimization, again, to continue familiarizing yourself with output of modern compilers when dealing with fundamentally "honest" code.

Once you can eyeball things and get an intuitive sense for that sort of thing is where you jump off into dealing with dishonest code. Stuff put through obfuscators. Stuff designed to work in ways that hide what the actual intent of the code is, or things designed in ways that make it clear that the author had something up their sleeve.

It'll be a lot of work and memorization and pattern recognition building, and you'll have to put in the effort to get to know the hardware and memory architecture, and opcodes and ISA's, and virtual machines you're reversing for, but it will click eventually.

Just remember; odds are it won't make you money, and it will set time on fire. I cut my teeth on reversing some security firm's snake oil, and just trying to figure out why the code I wrote was acting weird after the compiler got done with it. (I have cursed at more compiler writers than about anyone but myself).

Then just remember that if someone got it to run, then it's gotta eventually make sense. The rest is all persistence on your part of laying bare their true, usually perverted motivations (generally boiling down to greed, job security, or wasting your goddamn time).

Would the world be nicer if that wasn't the case? Absolutely. I lived through a period where a lot of code wasn't "something up my sleeve" code. Now is not so much that time anymore. We've made programming too accessible to business types that now the interests of organization's at securing their power has a non-trivial distortion on how code gets written; which generally means user hostile in one way or another.