Guide to Assembly Language

This concise guide is designed to enable the reader to learn how to program in assembly language as quickly as possible. Through a hands-on programming approach, readers will also learn about the architecture of the Intel processor, and the relationship between high-level and low-level languages.

This updated second edition has been expanded with additional exercises, and enhanced with new material on floating-point numbers and 64-bit processing.

Topics and features:

• Provides guidance on simplified register usage, simplified input/output using C-like statements, and the use of high-level control structures
• Describes the implementation of control structures, without the use of high-level structures, and often with related C program code
• Illustrates concepts with one or more complete program
• Presents review summaries in each chapter, together with a variety of exercises, from short-answer questions to programming assignments
• Covers selection and iteration structures, logic, shift, arithmetic shift, rotate, and stack instructions, procedures and macros, arrays, and strings
• Includes an introduction to floating-point instructions and 64-bit processing
• Examines machine language from a discovery perspective, introducing the principles of computer organization

A must-have resource for undergraduate students seeking to learn the fundamentals necessary to begin writing logically correct programs in a minimal amount of time, this work will serve as an ideal textbook for an assembly language course, or as a supplementary text for courses on computer organization and architecture. The presentation assumes prior knowledge of the basics of programming in a high-level language such as C, C++, or Java.

Dr. James T. Streib is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Illinois College, Jacksonville, IL, USA. His other publications include the Springer textbooks Guide to Data Structures and Guide to Java.