6 Invaluable Assembly Books

Hands down, the best book for actually understanding what is going on inside the computer when you write assembly language - and by extension any programming language. If you in fact plan on reading one of the books in that article, then I cannot recommend highly enough that you read this first. It will provide groundwork that will make it much easier to understand those books.

It's *hugely* out of date. But it is still head and shoulders above anything else I have ever seen.

Hopfully an amazon link...

The link is so long that I don't know if it will work or not. But one can find it on Amazon (after having followed the link on the front of Lxer :) ) for an extremely reasonable price, $11.99 brand new. ISBN: 0-471-57814-2

This is what I started with way back in the day

Mastering Machine code on the ZX Spectrum http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=2000237

Then I made my way up the ladder from there to other 8 bit micros MCS51 series then onto Z280 & z380, x86 etc.

I still have my copy to this day in fact i'm caressing it right now as it and the ZX Spectrum pretty much made me what I am.

Edit: I remember my x86 introduction vividly as it was a nightmare, I was pretty much dropped in at the deep end and told to start swimming, my x86 knowledge at this point was slim to none and I had to fix and modify a TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) comms app anyone remember them :)

Cheers

NASM/MASM is a world of difference from what assembly programming used to be in the early 1980s... With modern IDEs it's almost a high level language these days. Back in the day, you had to do by hand, a lot of the things that modern compiling tools now do for you. I tried my hand at 6502/6510 assembly, back in the day, but gave it up. When I recently learned x86-32bit assembly, it was a world of difference. I enjoy the low-level stuff though.

I still have a copy of Masm 6.11 somewhere but haven't used it in donkeys, I still do some legacy work on Z280 micro-controller based data acquisition boards for a UK company which is mostly a mix of C & Assembly and surprisingly they still perform damned well to this day.

But now that I'm semi-retired and a stay at home dad I pretty much go with the easy option of Java application development as a hobby.

I still have that book (Mastering Machine code on the ZX Spectrum). I never did master machine code on the Spectrum though.

I did manage to complete all the levels of Manic Miner without losing a life though.

To this day I have never completed Manic Miner, I did complete Head over Heels though.