Customer Reviews

An Assembly Language Introduction to Computer Architecture: Using the Intel Pentium

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This book is an excellent resource on how computers work, and the theory behind their operation. The book describes, in detail, number representation, floating point operations, bitwise operations, binary mathematical operations, memory layout, cpu operations, registers, and more.

This book's primary focus is not assembly language. Assembly language (via an abstraction called SASM) is merely used in the book to illustrate computer architechture. Those looking for an assembly language refrence should look elsewhere; Those looking for a computer architecture book should purchase this title.

The book's title implies that it has lots of specifics to the Intel Pentium, which it does, but it doesn't have much IBM-PC related details (BIOS etc).

It has good sections on abstract principals and maths, which is useful.

If you want to write systems-code (which is what I did) then this is not the book for you. I recommend the book by Peter Abel instead, or download the (free) Intel documentation. There are also plenty of online resources.

However, assembly language (in my opinion) is for doing system-level stuff - not serious coding and that is the only reason that (I think) most people would want to learn it.