Customer Reviews

Assembly Language Programming for Intel Processors Family

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It has been my experience that the best programming books teach by presenting increasingly sophisticated examples, starting perhaps with the ubiquitous "Hello, World!" and moving on to more complicated topics. In this book, however, the first significant programming example doesn't appear until page 229, over 1/3 of the way into the text.

While it is clear that the author is an expert on the topic, his presentation of the material leaves much to be desired. The book is also rife with typographical errors, and I felt that many of the diagrams were sloppy- both things that might be frustrating to a novice.

For a book on modern computer architecture, I'd suggest the classic text, "Computer Organization and Design" by Patterson and Hennessey. For Intel-specific assembly language programming, check out the book by Kip Irvine.

I don't know how these assembly language book authors think. But I will tell you what a great book about assembly language should contain.

On the Intel X86 architecture it should be divided in different chapters holding information of CPU instructions, FPU instructions, MMX and SSE instructions. In each chapter, the instructions described should be further divided by functionality, like aritmetic instructions, data movement instructions, logical operation instructions and so on.

There should also be two reference guides (appendixes) in the book for looking up instructions. The first guide with the same sorting as in the chapters above. For example, if you need a data packing instruction for MMX, you will look up the MMX part and "data packing instructions" subpart in the appendix. You will there find the instruction you need and everything about it. The second guide should have the instructions in alphabetical order, so you will be able to look up an instruction you know about by name and functinality, but do not remember all of it's semantics.

All this books about assembly language tends to be as bad electronic device manuals. You have to skim it from the beginning to end to find what you are looking for. If a book was written as described above, it would be useful for both beginners and professionals.

This was my first ASM book I've bought: it was the first original edition in Romanian (didn't read the English translation yet).

I must agree that it has many typographical mistakes and some of the schematics are not very easy to understand.

It is made up of two parts the first one being the Intel processor architecture and the second the assembly language and integration with higher level languages (FPU, SIMD included).

By combining the information in this book and Ralf Brown's Interrupt list one can learn and do almost anything with x86 CPUs without waisting your time with unwanted details found in other ASM books.

If you are a beginner (never touched asm) you should consider reading this after you get bored with those thick ASM books and keep it as reference.

I believe that this book will be able to "whet your beak" if you are starting to study the Assembly language, but I wouldn't say that it is a complete beginner's book. It is entirely true that this book is full of typographical errors, however, because it was translated from Romanian, the tone of the text is neutral and the author does not sound pretentious (My library of computer books outweighs 2 average-built people, and it is common for the American software developer writers to sound self-absorbed). I felt that the subjects of this book were covered in detail. I believe this book has the power to widen perspectives on the Intel machine hardware architecture and will be of help in studying the Assembly language itself.

The first part of the book which constitutes to about 150 pages or so is all theory, and we do not see code examples until the mid section of the book. I don't believe a book should be all about code, and felt it was a reasonable approach. Where there is no code, the author gives extensively deep detail about the subjects he is writing about. I was impressed by the introduction that contained detailed information on the history of the processor, and some of the key points that no other book I have talks about.

One thing I would wish for is a closer analysis of the MMX instruction set and more on practical implementation, to which the author dedicates only several pages. He does however talk about it throughout the text here and there.

Another great book that I recommend for beginners is Assembly Language Step By Step by Jeff Duntemann which is also written in a non-pretentious tone and simply is a joy to read whether you are a serious programmer who wants to know details or someone who is interested in how the computer works on a lower level. http://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Step-step-Programming/dp/0471375233