At first glance, the number of displays that IDA offers can seem overwhelming. You may find it easiest to stick with the primary displays until you are comfortable enough to begin exploring the additional display offerings. In any case, you should certainly not feel obligated to use everything that IDA throws at you. Not every window will be useful in every reverse engineering scenario.

In addition to the windows covered in this chapter, you will be confronted by a tremendous number of dialogs as you endeavor to master IDA. We will introduce key dialogs as they become relevant in the remainder of the book. Finally, other than the default disassembly view graph, we have elected not to cover graphs in this chapter. The IDA menu system distinguishes graphs as a separate category of display from the subviews discussed in this chapter. We will cover the reasons behind this in Chapter 9, which deals exclusively with graphs.

At this point, you should be starting to get comfortable with the IDA user interface. In the next chapter, we begin to focus on the many ways that you can manipulate a disassembly to enhance your understanding of its behavior and to generally make your life easier with IDA.