Covert Java

A large portion of the book is dedicated to techniques that are commonly considered to be hacking. Hacking is used rather freely in the media and oftentimes with negative connotation. Hackers are frequently portrayed as crazy geeks wanting to boost their self esteem, and for some cases this is certainly true. The methods presented here, however, are intended for professional software developers and each technique has a real-life application.
Java developers and architects stand the best chance of learning the most from this work. To truly appreciate the problems and solutions presented in this book, you should have completed at least a few significant Java applications and worked with third-party code. That is not to say that junior developers have nothing to gain from this work. To keep the book concise and focused on the main topics, little coverage is given to the subjects that are expected to be well-known or well-documented. For example, when talking about hacking non-public class members, the book does not explain the limitations imposed by each visibility modifier. Such information can be easily obtained from the Internet or books that cover these topics in detail. Covert Java: Techniques for Decompiling, Patching, and Reverse Engineering is about extreme techniques that punch through the commonly expected boundaries.