The Great IDA Primer

Why is IDA so useful? Because it can do anything. IDA will change the way you think about disassemblers; it will change the way you think about cracking. W32Dasm? A toy. Soft-Ice? Unnecessary. When you have a disassembler that lets you follow the flow of execution by tapping the keyboard, backtrace just as easily, name variables/addresses/functions, view the entire program as opcodes or assembly, change code to data and back again according to your whim, and even run limited C programs to perform operations on the code from searching and parsing to translating and patching...why go somewhere else?