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, you got acquainted with system calls --an operating system's service gateway. You learned that it is much more practical and convenient to use existing libraries in order to invoke system calls indirectly, and in a much more convenient and secure way.

This chapter was intentionally left without 64-bit examples, as I would like you to try and write 64-bit versions of these simple executables yourself as a small exercise to test yourself.

Now we are masters. We have a firm base and are able to implement any algorithm in pure Intel Assembly, and we are even able to invoke system calls directly (on Linux at least, as it is strongly discouraged on Windows). However, as real masters, we know that there is much more to learn and explore, as a base alone is not enough.