Return to Assembler

I got a copy of The Art of Assembly Language from a local library and am working my way through it. I downloaded it from Webster years ago and have been meaning to read it, but it is much more pleasant to read a hard copy.

Assembly Language was my first programming language, but is has been two decades since I used it. I programmed 6800, 6502, 8080, Z-80 & 8086 CPUs in Assembly Language and read up on the 80386 instruction set, but never used it. Things have changed a bit. I never used the FPU before, it is a bit different; and the MMX instruction are not at all what I'm used to. But the basics are still the same.

I have read lots of complaints about HLA. I understand the complaints. The whole point of writing in assembler is to exercise total control over the machine code, polymorphic functions and exception handling seem to fly in the face of this idea. However, I find to be a very good learning tool. It allows me focus my attention of what I'm trying to understand, not the gory details of I/O etc.

The book assumes that you have an operating system, so it does not get into issues like resets and IPL. I wish it covered this because I'm very curious how IPL is handled on a multi core CPU.