Programming From The Ground Up (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

I highly recommend working through this book even if you'll never program assembly again... you'll be a vastly better programmer. -- Joel Spolsky, JoelOnSoftware.com

Product Description

Programming from the Ground Up is an introduction to programming using assembly language on the Linux platform for x86 machines. It is a great book for novices who are just learning to program as well as for intermediates who have never learned or mastered assembly language programming. It covers many topics skipped by other similar books, including memory management, debugging, interfacing with C, dynamic libraries, and even a bit on GUI programming.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 332 pages
• Publisher: Bartlett Publishing (July 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975283847
• ISBN-13: 978-0975283844
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #264,800 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A student's take, June 12, 2004

By	"aerinfir" (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews

I'm a student who used this book as the text for the assembly portion of a systems programing class. I must say, I was impressed. The ordering of material seemed natural and the explanations were quite good, especially the section on low-level memory management. Ever wonder how calloc and malloc work? This actually has assembly code (accompanied with plenty of explanation) for writing a basic memory manager.

The nice thing about it is that its written for the gcc compiler and IA-32 architecture, so all you need to write programs that run on your machine is an Intel processor with a Linux partition.

For people who are just beginning to program, the ground-up style of this book gives a unique perspective. Because assembly is more difficult than higher-level languages, I'd recommend that true beginners get familiar with a language like C or Java first, then turn to this book for a fuller understanding of programming. About a semester's worth of another language should prepare you I think. That being said, I do think it's easy to overlook the importance of low-level programming. After you have some experience with control structures and manipulating strings, take a look at this book to really flesh out your knowledge. I definitely felt I gained a better understanding of how we get from source code in a text file to instructions that the machine can really understand.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PDF version available free online, March 5, 2006

By	sansai "sansai" - See all my reviews

This book's homepage:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

It can be downloaded free of charge at:
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best way to get started with linux asm, December 24, 2004

By	K. Ellison "rps-books" (Kansas City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After looking around for an introduction to assembly in linux, this is the best book I found (well, there's not much competition). I had heard asm is hard, but you'll be up and running very quickly with this book - it's actually quite easy. I have no intention of doing any real programming in assembly, but after learning the basics I have a better idea of what code in a higher level language compiles to, I finally really understand pointers and the difference between the heap and the stack, etc.

It loses a point for trying to be an introduction to programming in general. There are better books for that, and better approaches than starting at the lowest level (actually, you *could* build your own chips..). It is not a general reference to assembly, will not take you very deep, and is not intended to. IMHO, it should have been.

Anyway, this is the place to go if you want to get started on asm and you use linux (in particular, it's better than the Hyde book).