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

In this chapter, we had a brief introduction to addressing modes on the modern Intel CPU. Some resources define more addressing modes, but, let me reiterate that as a huge fan of Occam's Razor, I do not see any reason to multiply things without need, as most of those additional modes are just variations of the modes already explained above.

Thus far, we saw how both code and data may be addressed, which is mostly the essence of programming in the Assembly language. As you will witness while reading this book and trying the code yourself, at least 90% of writing a program in Assembly is writing how you want some data to be moved, where from and where to (the remaining 10% are actual operations on data).

By getting this far, we are ready to dive deeper into Assembly programming and try to actually write working programs, rather than typing a few lines into a template...