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 covered just a few aspects of interfacing your Assembly code to the outer world. There are numerous programming languages out there; however, a decision was taken to concentrate on C/C++ and the .NET platform as the best way to illustrate how modules written in Assembly language may be bound to the code written in high-level languages. To put it simply, any language that is compiled into native code would use the same mechanism as C and C++; on the other hand, any .NET-like platform, although, having a platform-specific binding mechanism, would use the same approach on a low level.

However, I assume that there is one question hanging in the air. How about linking third-party code to our Assembly program? Although the title of this chapter may have implied that this topic is included, it would make much more sense to cover it in the next chapter as the...