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

Preface

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.

Unfortunately, the modern world of software development does not require deep understanding of how programs are executed on the low level, not to mention the number of scripting languages and different frameworks that are there to ease the process of software development, and which are often mistakenly treated as inefficient mostly because developers think that the framework/scripting engine should cope with the lameness of the code. The intent behind this book is to show how important it is to understand the basics, which are too often left behind a developer’s learning curve.

The Assembly language is a powerful tool that developers may use in their projects to gain more efficiency with their code, not to mention that Assembly is the basis of computing even in today's world of high-level languages, software frameworks, and scripting engines. The core idea behind this book is to familiarize software developers with things that are often skipped or are not given enough attention by developers and, much worse, by those who teach them. It may be hard to believe that the Assembly language itself is only the tip of the iceberg (unfortunately, the part of the iceberg that is hidden in water falls outside the scope of this book), but even it alone may highly improve your ability to develop much cleaner, more elegant and, more importantly, much more efficient code.