Customer Reviews

Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

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This is an excellent treatment of the MSIL topic at just the right level if you're in need of nitty gritty details for debugging, disassembling, or generating IL code. Coverage of the PE format for managed executables is the best I've seen. The text is well-written, the examples are clear and concise, and the diagrams are very helpful. The book can be used as both a tutorial and a reference: the appendices include an ILAsm grammar reference, a metadata tables reference, and an IL instruction set reference. The book is also available electronically to owners of the physical book.

Coding in assembly language requires a little different way of thinking, and being aware of lot more low level details, compared to writing the code in a high level language like C# or VB.NET. Since I have not written an assembly language program in a very long time, it was quite a challenge to follow this book. But I must say that, the author has done a good job of laying out the concepts in a way a novice assembly programmer like me can benefit a lot from it. I can't claim that, after reading this book, I have become very good at IL, but I am quite confident that a second run through this book and more practice in IL coding will take me closer to being there.

First three chapters of this book dive straight into an IL program and compare it with a C# program. I thought it was great way to open the book by getting your feet wet quickly without overwhelming you. From fourth chapter onwards the book goes into details of windows PE file and arrangement of Metadata into modules and assemblies. I have not found this kind of detailed information about Metadata layout anywhere else. It is tons of information and still does not overwhelm you. This information is useful even for a high level language programmer and therefore I would recommend this book to all .NET developers.

As author says, .NET universe is like a great pyramid turned upside down and CLR is the tip on which this pyramid stands. ILAsm is the language that describes every feature of the CLR and therefore learning ILAsm language will help all .NET developers build a strong foundation, and that is where this book comes very handy.

As an engineer, I like to understand how things work, part of this was a curiosity about the semantics of IL. This book satisfied me by clarifying the details and instructions of IL. In addition, there is detailed coverage of the assembly file format and metadata. The book is well written and after the first few chapters, I had a clear picture of the basics of IL. The rest of the information is mostly specific details that is likely to be valuable only to people who will actually build tools that need to process or generate IL.

Overall, I am not sure how valuable the information is to the average programmer. I can think of few cases where I will need the information in here. But, for a hacker with a curiosity to know what's happening one level closer to the machine this book makes for an interesting read.

The book is the only one that I have found on this topic and it is clearly written, and it may inspire you to take on a new project in IL.

Wonderful experience writing an IL code generator. Project went quickly, easily, with high quality result. Thanks to Microsoft's .Net and IL ecosystem, and three books; Expert .Net IL Assembler (Serge Lidin), Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard (James S. Miller), ECMA-335 CLI Standard (downloadable from ECMA).

I needed a good "go-to" reference which would aid me in quickly gaining knowledge so I could understand disassembled PE files related to a "small" project I had already invested 40 man-hours. There are references you can find on the web, however, this book will save you time looking for them. It consolidates all information you need to quickly get up to speed if you have not been doing assembler code projects for a while. The author's writing style reflects his extensive knowledge and "comfortableness" in discussing it. He includes invaluable references to tools one can use related to the subject he is discussing. The Appendixes contain excellent information that is quickly accessible simply flipping through the pages. I am not a compiler writer by trade, but I had a good laugh related to the author's comments in Chapter 19's Summary (on page 408). You'll just have to purchase the book to find out! I look forward to investing more time in reading this book in detail. If you have to spend money on a tool, this book is money well spent.

This book is best ever! You can learn IL, but you can undarstand MSIL, how aplications are build.