The title seems a bit misleading, e.g. one could reverse engineer source code into UML. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be: A Gentle Primer on Code disassembling.
The way most people use the terminology now, I'd say "reverse engineering" encompasses all the strategies of analyzing and unraveling the logic of assembler code. On the other hand "code disassembling" is more specific about using a tool such as IDA to disassemble the binary executable into assembly before the intellectual task reverse engineering begins.
That's a bit misleading. Reverse engineering has, on the face, little to do with assembler of any sort; it's about understanding your target and choosing the best angle of attack to learn more about it. That often depends on how the target was produced in the first place. If it's written in C or C++, sure, go to the assembler. If it's some Adobe Air program that is really just a launcher for a SWF, well, you're not going to have much luck. Similarly, the application logic in a program like EVE Online is almost entirely written in Python; you wouldn't exactly know it from the outside, because they've wrapped all the native things they need. But then you won't learn much either just looking at the assembly of what are various layers and layers of wrappers.
Great work. I worked with RTMP for some time and I recall the pain to reverse-engineer their protocol. One other comment, maybe the title should be more like: "How I improved a slow/inefficient RTMP video streaming service by 20x". Just a thought.
