The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

1.8 Some Basic Machine Instructions

The 80x86 CPU family provides from just over a hundred to many thousands of different machine instructions, depending on how you define a machine instruction. Even at the low end of the count (greater than 100), it appears as though there are far too many machine instructions to learn in a short time. Fortunately, you don't need to know all the machine instructions. In fact, most assembly language programs probably use around 30 different machine instructions.^[6] Indeed, you can certainly write several meaningful programs with only a few machine instructions. The purpose of this section is to provide a small handful of machine instructions so you can start writing simple HLA assembly language programs right ...