Learning x86 directly can be a bit hard. There are easier assemblies to begin with (e.g: 8085). There's an educational program called gnusim8085, which I found

Learning x86 directly can be a bit hard. There are easier assemblies to begin with (e.g: 8085). There's an educational program called gnusim8085, which I found excellent to get started with assembly, because while it's similar to x86, it has fewer instructions and registers. It comes with a debugger, a tutorial and some example programs. https://gnusim8085.github.io/screenshots https://gnusim8085.github.io/screenshots To learn reverse engineering look for "crackme" programs. These are programs that contain challenges for you to crack, and come with graded levels of difficulty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackme. Now, one of the techniques that I've found more useful is the NOP sled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_slide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_slide. Easy to implement as well, just replace bytes with the opcode 90 (NOP, or no operation). The editor I use is a clone of Hiew called ht: http://hte.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html http://hte.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html, which is free and multiplatform (just make sure to switch to disassemble mode with F6) This other tool is free and can be a good alternative to IDA Pro on Windows: http://x64dbg.com/ http://x64dbg.com/ In this way you can get started for free.