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

Mixing Modules Written in Assembly and Those Written in High-Level Languages

We have come a long way and have covered almost every aspect of Assembly programming basics. In fact, we should be able to implement any algorithm in Assembly language by this time; however, there are a few important things left we have not touched yet, but they are nonetheless important to know.

Despite the fact that writing relatively large parts of a product (not to say writing a complete product) in Assembly language may not be the best idea when it comes to timelines, it may still be a very interesting and challenging task (educational as well). Sometimes it is more convenient to implement certain parts of an algorithm in Assembly, rather than using a high-level language. Remember the tiny virtual machine we used for XOR encryption of data? For the sake of an example, we will implement a simple encryption...