I know this isn't quite what you're asking, but I really recommend "Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition" by Jeff Duntemann
One of the best 32bit x86 assembly books out there.
Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#62Your sources indicate an interest in reverse engineering, but another motivator for low level machine programming is performance.
For me, a great way of learning the latter is to pick a task with some instant gratification (audio dsp, software texmapping or shaders?) and start writing some of that in inline assembly.
I suggest looking at your C compiler output, learning about SIMD instructions and using a pipeline simulator to see why and how it performs like it does. I used VTune and AMD Codeanalyst back in the day, don't know what's the current SoA.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to IDA, I highly recommend looking into ghidra. It's open source, so you can peak under the hood and see how it does things. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
Yep. It's a FOSS-quality disassembler; good if you don't have IDA (I wish), supports maybe 10% of what IDA does in total but has some other niceities that it doesn't (think: disassembler-equivalent of LLVM). (Ideally, you'd have both.) For those who don't know, IDA disassembles basically every unclassified, commercially-available architecture and executable/library/object container format (think: disassembler-equival…
You might be interested in this talk from the creator of IDA, Ilfak Guilfanov, explaining how he used Sourcer and it's shortcomings lead directly to him creating IDA.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#64If you basically don't know how to code in assembly, learn 16-bit x86 with whichever method you find, it won't be wasted. You can extend most of the knowledge from 16 to 32 bit substituting register names ax,bx,cx,dx,si,di,bp,sp y eax,ebx,ecx,edx,esi,edi,ebp,esp. You can extend that to 64 bit with rax,rbx,rcx,rdx,rsi,rdi,rbp,rsp. Learning 16-bit x86 will have you learn about segment registers, but it isn't wasted eit…
>Learn whatever assembly language first
On this front, I can highly recommend these two resources, preferably in this order for someone totally new to assembly:
NAND to Tetris, a course that will have you build an emulated general-purpose CPU from first principles even with no prior knowledge. You'll learn exactly about registers and memory by making them. I even recommend this to non-hardware people because the way they divide each layer of complexity is great practice even in software. https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer
Microcorruption, a series of incrementally difficult MSP430 (an easy-to-understand 16-bit instruction set) exploitation exercises in the browser: https://microcorruption.com
These are both geared towards being a gentle introduction to assembly and CPU architecture principles. They don't touch certain facts of X86/64 processors like pipelining or variable-length instructions, but IMO those are best left until you're comfortable with the basics.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to IDA, I highly recommend looking into ghidra. It's open source, so you can peak under the hood and see how it does things. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
It's way better than IDA Pro. I have used the Pro version with the Hex-Rays decompiler. Ghidra is legitimately better. I wouldn't recommend IDA to anyone at this point because I don't see it having much of a future (sorry not sorry). It's worth learning the Ghidra Scripting API because you can write ad-hoc scripts with Jython syntax to automate tasks/do custom analysis.
I was using ghidra for one of my uhh research projects earlier and I actually found the decompiler from hex rays still does better in some cases. In ghidra sometimes it times out and fails to decompile. Maybe I'm not using it correctly? I haven't begun exploring what kind of plug-ins and stuff it has, maybe that helps?
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#66There's no magic anywhere and 99.1% of it is documented. IA-32e/AMD64 is basically an extension of IA-32/x86. What you're looking for is to understand the difference between real mode, 386 protected mode, PAE, paging and long mode because the registers, instructions, addressing and sizes of structures differ. You can learn all of this by reading the Intel software manuals and digging into it yourself. Tools you need…
> IA-32e I’ve never seen this name before. Where does it come from? AMD call it AMD64. Intel call it Intel 64. Why do we need even more names for the same thing beyond these two?! x86_64, x86-64, x64, AMD64, amd64, Intel 64, EM64T, all mean the same thing!
Wild guess, naming it '32bit extended' allowed Intel to still refer to Itanium as the 'real 64 bit' back in those days.
Intel didn't want the x86 to be 64bit.. they wanted the world to switch to Itanium for that. I figure a lot of the naming mess can be traced back to Intel's marketing.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#67book link -> http://vkh8ilkvln.pdfcloud.org/dl2.php?id=174628357&h=7a0f16...
video link -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWKlgEi9js&list=PLXYpRL4SQp...
linker -> http://www.masm32.com/
some way to understand assembly lang
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#68I found compiler output to be a good resource. $ gcc foo.c -S
A little bit more convenient, at least for me:
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#69If you basically don't know how to code in assembly, learn 16-bit x86 with whichever method you find, it won't be wasted. You can extend most of the knowledge from 16 to 32 bit substituting register names ax,bx,cx,dx,si,di,bp,sp y eax,ebx,ecx,edx,esi,edi,ebp,esp. You can extend that to 64 bit with rax,rbx,rcx,rdx,rsi,rdi,rbp,rsp. Learning 16-bit x86 will have you learn about segment registers, but it isn't wasted eit…
Started with 6502 (pretty much the only way to get any reasonable speed/working was Assembly).
Switching to 8086 was so awkward: it had built in div, instruction, the rep prefix but most importantly so many bits - 16. I routinely used ah/al and the like.
Learning Assembly is quite easy on its right own, ability to write optimal code and routinely being compilers is a whole another story. Writing the inner loops (like grep) is what's usually left to on modern processors.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best resource for learning modern x64 assembly?
#70If you basically don't know how to code in assembly, learn 16-bit x86 with whichever method you find, it won't be wasted. You can extend most of the knowledge from 16 to 32 bit substituting register names ax,bx,cx,dx,si,di,bp,sp y eax,ebx,ecx,edx,esi,edi,ebp,esp. You can extend that to 64 bit with rax,rbx,rcx,rdx,rsi,rdi,rbp,rsp. Learning 16-bit x86 will have you learn about segment registers, but it isn't wasted eit…
>Learn whatever assembly language first On this front, I can highly recommend these two resources, preferably in this order for someone totally new to assembly: NAND to Tetris, a course that will have you build an emulated general-purpose CPU from first principles even with no prior knowledge. You'll learn exactly about registers and memory by making them. I even recommend this to non-hardware people because the way…
> NAND to Tetris
The book version is also great, and suitable for self-study if you prefer to learn that way: https://www.nand2tetris.org/book