Reverse Engineering - Introduction

Reverse Engineering - Series

I've been trying to learn Reverse Engineering for quite a while now. Granted; its one of the tougher subjects to learn, but the amount of literature there is out there is not really very well organized. I have invariably found myself giving up on it somewhere down the line due to the lack of direction on how to proceed. What I am trying to do now is start right from the basics yet again - This time i plan to document the approach much better than I have done. So atleast the next time I have some kind of a reference point to start from. I am not sure how long this will take or how many parts this will contain. All I plan to do here is to put down my learnings in an organized fashion so people new to this field do not struggle as much as I have and do not go down all the wrong paths of learning.

There are a few things that I have always got out of all those Reverse Engineering Tutorials I have read. This is a list of the same.
a) RTFM - Politely tells you to read a lot
b) Learn how to debug - Here ppl will rave a lot about Softice and Olly and W32 dasm and give examples
c) Learn assembly programming using NASM or something else - Will point you to a book in Assembly programming
d) Understand all the Intel syntax for instructions - Will point you to an Intel site
e) Solve crackme's - Little executables put together with a little bit of protection which you have to break
f) Examples - Many people will show you how they cracked something

Well, all of this no doubt is correct. But for a person like me, its still all too directionless and there is no one best way to learn all this. What to take first? How to begin? I know I always had those questions in my mind and still do. However I have now started on a path that I hope is correct. Over the next few articles I hope to blog as I learn. I'm still a novice , so do point out the mistakes I make and I'll correct them as I go on.