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 have briefly run through the basics of the internal structure of x86-based processors essential for the further understanding of topics covered in later chapters. Being a huge fan of Occam's Razor principle, yours truly had no intention to replicate Intel's programmer manual; however, certain topics covered in this chapter exceed the range of topics necessary for a successful start with Assembly language programming.

However, I believe that you would agree--we've had enough of dry information here and it is the right time to start doing something. Let's begin by setting up the development environment for Assembly language programming in Chapter 2, Setting Up a Development Environment.