Customer Reviews

ARM Assembly Language: Fundamentals and Techniques

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The purpose of this book is to introduce assembly language to college undergraduates who have had some programming experience. As a result, the book should be easy to follow for anyone already knows a programming language. The book explains the use of ARM's Keil Microcontroller Development Kit, which includes an editor, assembler, and debugger. A "lite" version that is limited to 32KB of code (more than enough for learning assembly language) is available for free. It's a Windows executable, but I have been running it on Linux using WINE with no problems. This means that you do not need an ARM processor to run your ARM programs, and the debugger lets you set breakpoints, single step through code, and observe all the registers and memory as your program executes.

Some of the explanations are not as clear as they could be, such as the initial explanation of condition codes. The book also covers only the ARMv4T instruction set and THUMB instruction set used in ARM7TDMI and later processors, not the newer instructions or new Unified Assembly Language. This coverage is appropriate for programmers new to ARM, because most code uses the older instructions and much existing code uses the old version of the assembly language.

I'd recommend the ARM architecture to anyone who wants to learn an assembly language because the instruction set is relatively simple compared to other popular architectures (namely Intel x86 and x86-64) and is easy to learn. ARM is a very popular architecture for the quickly growing embedded systems market, and it also contains features that are common in newer processors such as conditional execution of instructions to avoid branches. The book has an emphasis on programming for embedded systems, so it includes examples involving digital signal processing, data communications, and interfacing with peripherals.

Although the book wasn't out yet, ARM was kind enough to forward me an excerpt and table of contents from the book. This guy is obviously NOT an academic but an engineer. It's easy to read and the book isn't filled with Greek letters just to make it sound scholarly. I like the fact that you get some tools to use with the book, that is very useful. I wish he talked more about how to mix C and assembly together, and there are a couple of examples that could use more explanation, but otherwise, so far I like the style of the writing. The chapter on arithmetic is by far the best explanation I've seen yet on how to play with integer and fractional math. I've never seen that explained anywhere before. And it's not a bad reference, since you get part of the Architectural Reference Manual in the back. As far as textbooks go, this one is very readable, and would definitely help anyone doing ARM related coursework.

The book begins with a short but informative intro to RISC and ARM. This opening sets the stage for where ARM fits in the industry and why its importance has grown. By the time you're done with the first 25 pages, you'll also know tech concepts well enough to understand low-level computing systems and how bits become software.

The second chapter provides an introduction to ARM's programming model. Chapter 3 gets you up and running with simple programs. The book refers to a freely available IDE you can use to run programs. The author writes, "Learning assembly requires an adventurous programmer" and your first adventure may be looking for more details on the IDE (in Appendix B.)

After installing the IDE, you'll soon be stepping through your first simple assembly language programs on your own. Run sample programs while reading to keep things interesting.

If you press on beyond the simpler examples, Chapter 4 provides Assembler Directives you'll need for more complicated programs. Chapters 5 thru 11 cover essential, common ingredients in program design - addressing, arithmetic, looping. branching, tables, subroutines, stacks, exceptions etc. If you've previously worked with a higher level language like C, you'll see how ARM's assembly code relates. In a number of descriptive examples, C code snippets are translated directly into Assembly Language.

Chapter 12 was my favorite - rolling the prior chapter lessons into an embedded system design with UART, D/A converter, memory map and more. The book's final two chapters cover THUMB, a 16-bit subset of ARM's instruction set, and guidance for mixing C with Assembly.

This book mixes great technical content with a hands-on opportunity to work in ARM code. The author's experience at ARM helps make this an authoritative text - bringing together his dozen years of engineering work and his role in ARM's academic program. The end result is a book that serves as a great tool for learning the essentials of how ARM works.

This book is very useful for those who wants to know more about ARM. As the title states, FUNDAMENTALS AND TECHNIQUES of Arm Assembly Language. In my opinion, it is easy to understand but having more examples would be better.