Customer Reviews

Introduction to Assembly Language Programming: From 8086 to Pentium Processors (Undergraduate Texts in Computer Science)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am the author of the book. The book's home page has detailed instructions to download free Microsoft assembler (MASM). You can also download the source code of all the programs used in the book. For instructors and students, viewgraph slides are available for all the chapters.

Good introductory books on assembly language are hard to come by, especially for the Intel platform. This is an attempt to fill the gap, and looking through the topics covered, it looks promising. Unfortunately, the language is so poor that the book is virtually unreadable. Almost every piece of information is repeated 2 or 3 times, sometimes resulting in an almost comical effect.

So, better luck with another book...

This book can be a good choice for Computer Architecture introductory courses using IA32 as ISA reference. It can be useful for students as a general reference. However, complementary classic texts are also needed to cover a course, because the text of Dandamudi refers only to IA32, lacks a desiderable formal approach, and covers poorly (or does not cover) some typical issues (floating-point, DMA).

I found this book easy to read and learned a great deal from it. My background is a C/C++ programmer, who needs to do a little assembly programming at times. This is the best book I have found. My search was not exhaustive, but I did read chapters from a half-dozen other books and found them unacceptable. On the downside, there are more grammatical errors than the average programming book has, but this did not detract from its ability to teach the subject. There is also some repetition, but I found this helpful because it presented the more complex topics from a different angle and reinforced what I was trying to learn. Overall, I was very impressed with the clear and thorough explanations.