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

Other assembler directives (FASM Specific)

Up until now, we mostly considered macro instructions to be some sort of replacement for procedure calls, although I believe it would be correct to refer to them as convenience instruments for simplifying the writing and maintenance of the code. In this part of the chapter, we will see some so to say built-in macro instructions--assembler directives--which may virtually be divided into three categories:

  • Conditional assembly
  • Repeat directives
  • Inclusion directives
Additional categories may be present depending on assembler implementation. You should refer to the documentation of the assembler you are using for more information.

The conditional assembly

Sometimes we may want a macro...