PC Assembly Book (2006)

Author here. Surprised to see this here.<p>I wrote most of the book for the class I was teaching in the 90&#x27;s. All the textbooks I could find were for 16-bit DOS assembly. I wanted to do 32-bit and use free software. I picked NASM and djgpp because most of my students used Windows. There was no free express version of MS Visual Studio back then. I also wanted to cover interfacing with C since that&#x27;s how one typically uses assembly, plus it shows how C operates under the hood.<p>I went into industry in 2000, so never had the time to update it to 64-bit.

imo it really increases you understanding of security issues, stack, heap, over- and under-runs, debugging without source-code, low level caches etc. people often dismiss it because it not being a useful language to implement applications, but it&#x27;s kind of essential when optimizing C (you might want to play with inline assembly called from C - not always to make things faster but to better understand where your money is spent).<p>A great place to visit for a break is @x86instructions Twitter[1] feed. Absolutely hilarious (and you will need some humor to keep your sanity with Assembly on Intel), e.g.:<p>MOV - Literally Copy Something Instead Of Moving It<p>or<p>VLTAYTMPNL - I’d Like To Add Your Scalar Vector Lane To My Professional Network On LinkedIn<p>...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;x86instructions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;x86instructions</a>

I&#x27;d encourage every programmer to learn some basic assembly. Arguably ARM assembly is slightly easier to learn but either one will give you a better understanding of the API that your programming languages are abstracting over.<p>And in my experience it makes teaching about C pointers so much easier.

I got a printed copy of this book. It&#x27;s a great introduction to x86.

I&#x27;m learning about compilers and operating systems. And I don&#x27;t know how much assembly should I learn. Ofc, I can&#x27;t read whole x86 manual.