Finding a Good Book for Understanding Memory and C++

[v8n3t]

Hello everyone,

I am posting here because I am trying to find a book which is applicable to what I am trying to learn.

I have been searching through Amazon.com and have yet to find what I am looking for.

I will first start off by describing what I am trying to learn.

I want to learn how to access a specific program, do a memory dump of its entirety, then change a value and have the program reflect the change.

So for a real-world scenario, I would like to start small with the following.

Open Minesweeper,
get the process,
do a memory dump,
find the value which represents a mine,
change its state as if it were pressed down.


I feel this will allow me to start small and work my way up. I really want to understand how to access certain program's memory ranges, and how to determine them as well.

One thing I am trying NOT to do is learning these methods that are all proprietary to Microsoft's Library's using DWORD's and HWND's, and HANDLES etc.

I would much rather accomplish these tasks and learn the skills all from C++'s already provided functionality; this way I am not bound to Microsoft's Library's.

So thank you very much for your efforts in providing me with a Book that will help me learn what I am trying to learn.

If you can please post the Name of the Book and Author, or a Direct link to where I can obtain it that would be great.

Thanks again in advance for all your efforts.

[jsmith]

You won't find what you are looking for. To do what you want, you _will_ have to learn Microsoft's APIs as C++ does not provide platform-specific behavior.

[v8n3t]

So can you provide me with a good book for starters from what you mentioned above?

[budman85]

Accessing a process in memory, you would need to learn about Windows API and its messaging system.
Find a way to hook onto the process to send the requests. (there used to be a util called chook or something that wrapped the process so you can hook it and watch the messages as you do stuff in the process).
I've did this long time ago automating a production application using hooks and callbacks. It can be done without doing memory dumps.

If you mean you want to modify the original exe, you'd probably want a disassembler so you can look at the assembly code.
This output is usually rough draft material - nothing is polished. You will need to know assembly to be able to map out whats going on and then change it and re-assemble it.