Author Topic: Is there really no way to learn asm from a beginner's level?  (Read 45961 times)

Offline Bryant Keller

  • Forum Moderator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 360
  • Country: us
    • About Bryant Keller
Re: Is there really no way to learn asm from a beginner's level?
« Reply #45 on: March 11, 2015, 11:53:10 PM »
It's not that it's "poorly implemented", it's just difficult to deal with. There was no universal standard for how to implement the internals of the language so compiler writers are allowed a bit of freedom in implementation details.

About Bryant Keller
bkeller@about.me

Offline flatcircuit

  • Jr. Member
  • *
  • Posts: 4
Re: Is there really no way to learn asm from a beginner's level?
« Reply #46 on: October 10, 2015, 11:55:22 PM »
I'm new here and I did not read every post here, but I'm new to assembly and had a similar question. Let me extend your question and answer it.

If you are an absolute beginner, the difficulty you might have with assembler is the logic or process of writing functions and algorithms, which are always simple in high level languages. In assembly language, the programming construct is super simple, you need to understand addressing and basically jumping around in memory. The tough part at least for me was as I said, finding logic to finally realize an actual program.

Quick answer. this link http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/ is to a website of an assembly language teacher in a university. His latest book is very different from standard assembly language, but his DOS 16/bit book is exactly what you are looking for if you use NASM or similar assemblers. The book does not teach NASM, but teaches the mathematics and the logic of writing assembly language programs. It teaches from the ground up and has everything you need. Then you can just jump to 32 bit and 64 bit. That should be so obvious, that if you can't jump to 32 or 64 bit after that text, then you should go over it again.

This really teaches everything from the ground up. Other than that, you might want to learn Win32 assembly, which I am just now starting to look at myself. I'm still an absolute beginner in asm both ways, but I have experience with High Level Languages, such as C/C++ and Visual Basic. ... and don't let anyone tell you that you need that first to learn assembly. However, if you plan on a professional career, it would be beneficial to start with a High Level language.

Also, I would never go against a professional and teacher like Randal Hyde (the link I mentioned above), but if you pick up the newer 32 bit versions of his books, you might want to skip learning HLA, it's a custom language he is designing, but when I wanted to learn pure assembler, I discovered, that it was too cumbersome. but who knows you migh like it. My recommendation is his DOS 16bit book. You can even get FreeDOS to program in a virtual machine. Very cool.

So as a beginner, I noticed your question right away. You are looking for programming logic as it relates to assembly language. With that said, after a few weeks or months, most advanced texts should be much easier to use at least as a reference. That is the only way assembly is easy. Just keep at it and it will fall into place.