On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, R. Alan Monroe wrote: > > Pure assembler on a PC involves a huge amount of work for even > > the most trivial task. > > Some useful assembly tips here: > http://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
I never wanted to actually program assembly on the PC, but I did want to understand it (actually, I wanted to understand the Intel x86 architecture, and there's no better way of doing that than learning the assembly language for a machine). I read Jeff Duntemann's "Assembly language Step-by-Step," http://duntemann.com/assembly.htm , and found it very useful, although I didn't actually try any programming. I'm an old mainframe assembler language hack from way back in the IBM System/370 days (although in my last development job, I wrote more in machine code than in actual assembler), so I didn't really need or desire to do the practical aspects of actually writing x86 code; but I felt that would have been a good book to get me there, had that been what I wanted. A couple of years ago, I took a course in which I built a rudimentary computer around an Intel 8031 chip; and when I say "built," I mean built. It was a couple dozen components on a breadboard, with about only about 2Kbytes of memory, if I recall; I soldered or wire-wrapped every connection. You really learn an architecture when you do that. not that I remember much of it anymore, two years later. Not a route I recommend. I needed a few credits to fill an obscure educational requirement, though, and this was a fun way to do it. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor