A slide hammer is like a “reverse” hammer - instead of swinging it toward the target, you connect the hammer to something like a dent on a car and pull the slide in the other direction, hammering away from the target toward you.
I have one of those dent-pullers, and some other special ones like a tack hammer. and framing hammer, etc. But the most-loved hammer of my life was the spike maul, with which I became aquainted in the summer of 1957, when I was 20, young, strong, six feet tall and 175 pounds, and got the job as a section track hand--a "gandy-dancer"--on the Erie-Lackawanna railroad.
That is the tool of the spiker. I teamed up with another to drive more than a thousand spikes in replacing the track in front of the Hornell, NY train depot. My partner taught me all I needed to operate that ten-pound maul that when properly applied, resulted in a flat spot of about the size of a dime on the head of a railroad spike when it is driven home. That maul and its use has quite a story behind it.