Where should I start learning Assembly? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#31

Post by cjauvin » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:07 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #8

Which assembly? x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS? Personally my favourites are 6502 ( http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/ ) and 68k ( http://www.easy68k.com/ ) tho' neither of these are realistically of any commercial use.

I concur that 6502 programming is great fun. When I had a bout of C=64 nostalgia recently, I created a simple Tetris clone as a relearning project:

https://github.com/cjauvin/tetris-c64

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#32

Post by fromdoon » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

I highly recommend Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#33

Post by noonespecial » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

I'd second what others have said and go with a micro like an avr or a pic. Tons of open source support and a small system you can totally "own" will help you understand not just the code but how computers execute code at the lowest human-legible level.

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#34

Post by caisah » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

castor_pilot wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Jeff Duntemann's "Assembly Language Step-by-Step". I see there is a 3rd edition. Nice writing style and overall fun read.

I second that. That book is excellent.

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#35

Post by mpl » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

This isn't the most aesthetic site, but the content really is top-notch. If you really want to learn assembly (MIPS, in particular), I can't recommend this enough:

http://chortle.ccsu.edu/AssemblyTutorial/index.html

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#36

Post by svantana » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:38 PM UTC

If you're on a mac, XCode has a really nice feature: using the Assistant Editor (press the "bowtie icon"), you can get (dis-)assembly parallell to your source code and step through it with the debugger. A really convenient way of learning what's going on, and also understanding potential inefficiencies!

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#37

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:44 PM UTC

First, find Core Wars and play it until you can beat the "tutorial" programs. Hell, I should reimplement Core Wars as a JavaScript app doing CodeCombat style instruction for assembly.

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#38

Post by forgottenpaswrd » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:53 PM UTC

Get IDA pro and start reversing things with some clear objective. I learned a lot having friends that knew and competing with them to remove limits on commercial software when I was a teenager.

Making trial version complete and so on. Some times it was really easy(just finding a jmp and changing it), other times we had to compare with the complete program, finding code blocks,patching the trial and making all checksums and stuff to work.

None of the software that we cracked was released to the public, it was just for fun.

At the time there was little exercises called "crackme" for exercising your abilities.

It takes at least over a year of work to start being really good at this, and is not like Obj.C, Java or Python, or even c, but way more tedious. Without having friends on this and clear objectives I would had found it boring.

It would be probably a better idea to buy a micro processor and code simple things in assembly, like blinking LEDs.

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#39

Post by diydsp » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #37

First, find Core Wars and play it until you can beat the "tutorial" programs. Hell, I should reimplement Core Wars as a JavaScript app doing CodeCombat style instruction for assembly.

Yeah, an MMO Core wars could be fun :)

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#40

Post by znowi » Wed, Jan 29, 2014, 3:13 PM UTC

I can suggest this free book called "PC Assembly Language" by Dr Paul Carter.

http://www.drpaulcarter.com/pcasm/

The tutorial has extensive coverage of interfacing assembly and C code and so might be of interest to C programmers who want to learn about how C works under the hood. All the examples use the free NASM (Netwide) assembler. The tutorial only covers programming under 32-bit protected mode and requires a 32-bit protected mode compiler.