x86 Assemby Language programming on windows XP.

Question

I am facing extreme difficulty digesting the concepts of assembly language programming.

I am reading the book of Barry B Brey.

Please tell me if there is any good online tutorial and free Assembler Programming Tool very easy to begin with.

Answer 1

Art of Assembly Language Programming and HLA by Randall Hyde http://homepage.mac.com/randyhyde/webster.cs.ucr.edu/index.html

The book is available for free online. HLA is the companion High-Level Assembler that accompanies the book.

Answer 2

If you are trying to understand the concepts of programming assembly, Ketman's Assembly Language Tutorial is pretty good. It's a language tutorial built into an interpreter. You get instant results. Sadly, it's 8086 syntax not x86. They are similiar, but the x86 has a more full instruction set. Once you learn syntax and concepts, it's easy to switch instruction sets.

Link: http://www.btinternet.com/~btketman/tutpage.html

Answer 3

Besides the book already mentioned (The Art of ... ) i would also recommend you to try out emu8086 which sadly is not free, but its a great tool to start getting the hang of how to code in asm, and most of all, how the x86 family of processors work. All that without having to go through much trouble.

The problem is that, to be able to effectively code in asm you need some understanding of how the processor works, what instructions, flags, registers etc are available to you, etc.. and this tool does in my opinion a good job at helping you learn that. Besides you can trace step by step the state of the emulated processor (flags, register values, etc) and "debug" your code.

It also comes with a reference of the basic 8086 instructions available in almost all x86 processors, as well as tutorials and documented source codes you can try.