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Where should I start learning Assembly?

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Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#51

Post by bobowzki »

A good place to start programming assembly are on micro controllers (Arduino etc.). They have a more limited set of instructions, registers etc, and an easy to grasp memory layout. The development environments also often come with a pretty good debugger/simulator so you can step through your code and we how it works.

Good luck!

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#52

Post by syncopate »

A good way to learn asm is through books but there are not many for current architectures (especially x64, except the official Intel manuals which are quite good but also hard to read). Nevertheless, there are some on ARM which I can recommend, namely: ARM System Developer's Guide by Sloss, Symes and Wright. ARM Assembly Language by Hohl. ARM SoC Architecture by Furber.

IDA Pro is the industry standard for reverse engineering but it also is expensive (like USD $2k). There is a free version but it doesn't offer 64bit, so not really an option for modern ObjC or Intel computers. As you've mentioned ObjC chances are you work on OS X. IDA pro is not working well on OS X (the recommended way is to use the Windows version via virtualbox and not the OS X version). Still, Hopper.app is a great alternative on OS X. Not as good as IDA, but it has a Python interface, GDB support, and decompile support for ARM, Intel (and some knowledge regarding Objc). And it's only ~USD$100. [There is also a Windows version of hopper.app but it seems not yet ready to use, as I've only heard bad things about it there so far.]

Re: Where should I start learning Assembly?

#53

Post by ChuckMcM »

Start with a computer architecture introduction. The McGraw Hill Computer Science series book "Computer Architecture" did a good job of creating a fictional processor and then designing the machine code for it. "Assembly" is just a way to represent machine code in text files.

That way you will learn what it is the computer is trying to do, and how constraints on how it is built change that.

Then I'd suggest some cheap 8 bit Microprocessors like the AVR series and the PIC series from Atmel and Microchip respectively, (the AVR has solid C support so its probably a better single choice, but the PIC has weirdness associated with architecture constraints which is good to understand as well).

Once you are a pro writing AVR assembly code, then grab a copy of x86 assembly and a description of the Pentium architecture. To do it proper justice start with an 8086 assembly book, then a 286 assembly book, then a 386 one, and finally a Pentium one. That will let you see how the architecture evolved to deal with the availability of transistors.

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