I recently downloaded IDA and the learning curve is pretty hard with this program. Can anyone point me to good primers on IDA. I have read BlackB's IDA intro and mammon's ida primer essay. Any other good sources for learning how to use IDA?
Thanks

there isn't much to it. once you learn the
basic configuration, and preference tweaking,
you will need to move to the advanced stuff:

1) scripting; it has a cool C-like language to
automate most of the disassembly. you
will need _m's paper for this, and keep the
official api reference printed out and handy.

2) writing plugins; this allows you to extend its
functionality. Amante4 has writen a paper on
this.

That is all there is to it. You don't have master
all the supported platforms, just master the
subset you need.

I would recommend just playing with IDA a bit. Find a good protection and take a good look at it using all of the features of IDA. Just press different buttons and experiment with them as most of the buttons on the keyboard do something. The best way to learn (at least it was for me) is just to use it and fiddle around with all of the different functions and configurations until you learn something and find a configuration you like.