This page presents some useful external documentation sources, especially specifying and explaining the COFF binary formats.

The Portable Executable format

• Microsoft.com PE Format
• PE and COFF revision v11.0 [cached PDF version]
• Peering Inside the PE: A Tour of the Win32 Portable Executable File Format [cached PDF version]
• An In-Depth Look into the Win32 PE File Format, Part 1 [cached PDF version]
• An In-Depth Look into the Win32 PE File Format, Part 1 [cached PDF version]
• The PE Checksum Algorithm [cached PDF version]
• The BYTE* resources
• Tiny PE[cached HTML version]]

The Texas Instruments COFF format

See spraao8-Common Object File Format [cached version].