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

Summary

We began this chapter with creation of two templates--one for a 32-bit Windows executable and the other for a 32-bit Linux executable. While there are certain parts of both templates that may still be unclear, let that bother you not, as we will cover each and every aspect thereof when the time comes. You may use these templates as a skeleton for your own code.

The most significant part of the chapter, however, was dedicated to the Intel Instruction Set Architecture itself. It was, of course, a very brief overview as there was no need to describe each and every instruction--Intel did the job releasing their Programmer's Manual, which contains over three thousand pages. Instead, a decision was made to provide only the basic information and help us achieve certain level of acquaintance with Intel instruction set.

We ended the chapter by implementing the AES128 encryption...