Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)

It may virtually be right to say that any digital device has a specific set of instructions. Even a transistor, the foundation stone of modern digital electronics, has two instructions, on and off, where each one is represented by 1 or 0 (which one of these represents on and off depends on whether the transistor is n-p-n or p-n-p). A processor is constructed from millions of transistors and is, as well, controlled by sequences of 1s and 0s (grouped into 8-bit bytes grouped into instructions). Fortunately, we do not have to take care of instruction encoding (it's the 21st century out there) as assemblers do that for us.

Each CPU instruction (and this is right for any CPU, not only Intel based) has a mnemonic designation (further simply mnemonic), which you need to learn about along with a few simple rules regarding operand sizes (and...