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

Macro Instructions

Using Assembly language for the implementation of your ideas is fun (I surely have said that already and, probably, even more than once). However, it may become quite annoying when it comes to certain operations, which have to be re-implemented in different parts of your program. One possible solution may be implementing those operations in the form of a procedure and calling it when needed. However, this may quickly become a nuisance as well, once you have a procedure; which receives more than zero parameters. While in high-level languages you simply "pass" the parameters to a function, in Assembly, you have to actually pass them to a procedure in accordance with the calling convention of your choice, which, in turn, may imply additional headache with management of registers (if parameters are passed via certain registers) or accessing the stack....