1THINKING LOW-LEVEL, WRITING HIGH-LEVEL

If you want to write the best high-level language code, learn assembly language.

—Common programming advice

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This book doesn’t teach anything revolutionary. Rather, it describes a time-tested, well-proven approach to writing great code—understanding how the code you write will actually execute on a real machine. The journey to that understanding begins with this chapter. In it, we’ll explore these topics:

  • Misconceptions programmers have about the code quality produced by typical compilers

  • Why learning assembly language is still a good idea

  • How to think in low-level terms while writing HLL code

So, without ...

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