Professional Assembly Language

Introduction

Assembly language is one of the most misunderstood programming languages in use. When the term assembly language is used, it often invokes the idea of low-level bit shuffling and poring over thousand-page instruction manuals looking for the proper instruction format. With the proliferation of fancy high-level language development tools, it is not uncommon to see the phrase "assembly language programming is dead" pop up among various programming newsgroups.

However, assembly language programming is far from dead. Every high-level language program must be compiled into assembly language before it can be linked into an executable program. For the high-level language programmer, understanding how the compiler generates the assembly language code can be a great benefit, both for directly writing routines in assembly language and for understanding how the high-level language routines are converted to assembly language by the compiler.

Who This Book Is For

The primary purpose of this book is to teach high-level language programmers how their programs are converted to assembly language, and how the generated assembly language code can be tweaked. That said, the main audience for this book is programmers already familiar with a high-level language, such as C, C++, or even Java. This book does not spend much time teaching basic programming principles. It assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of computer programming, and are interested in learning assembly language ...