beginner

[vinayaksanga]

hi

i am a beginner to the world of MASM . so please any body can suggest me the best way to study and understand the basics and working of the masm lab

[ecube]

do you have a programming background? if not, jumping right into MASM isn't really a great idea. MASM is for programmers who want to take it to the next level, and care about performance and size. It's not a beginners language, so if you don't know other languages I recommend python to teach proper programming. PHP is a easy and fun language, java is decent. C/C++ are more advanced, harder to comprehend then others mentioned, but once you learn them, then MASM will be a good language to go after.

[Mark Jones]

Hello vinayaksanga, and welcome to the forum. :bg

As E^cube asks, do you have any other programming experience? Assembly language is not really like any other language, however many of the basic principles apply to all programming languages. So any other programming experience can only help with assembler. If you have none, then starting with Assembler will be quite difficult. (But not impossible.)

That said, the MASM32 package was not designed as a "beginner" package, although there are some tutorials available which can teach a great deal. Generally, when this question is asked, four choices are offered:

1. Try a professional book and/or course. Kip Irvine's course and book are common topics here.
2. Learn "High-Level Assembler" first (or exclusively.) Randall Hyde is a member here and has his own sub-forum. Note there is considerable debate as to the efficacy of this approach to learning MASM syntax. (HLA and MASM are very different.)
3. Try the Iczelion tutorials. These are a series of hands-on demonstrations of how to write all sorts of MASM code. Great if you can teach yourself the material.
4. Memorize the help documents in the MASM32 package, and learn from the example programs. ASMINTRO.CHM and MASM32.CHM are absolutely essential reading. Experiment, and come here and search for answers to questions when they arise. (Chances are very good that most beginner questions have been asked already.)

[anshum]

I am also new to masm and want to learn assembly language.I have done good amount of programming in c/c++ and java.Please help on how to get started

[ecube]

I am also new to masm and want to learn assembly language.I have done good amount of programming in c/c++ and java.Please help on how to get started

That's great to hear, well like Mark Jones said you should check out icezlions tutorials at http://win32assembly.online.fr/tutorials.html he's pretty much a living legend when it comes to masm32 through these tutorials and the various incredibly beautifully written code examples outside the tutorials. Hutch is the only one here I believe that got to meet him as he disappeared many many years ago. In any case these tutorials are how I started to learn masm years ago because it lets you start off doing fun things and you can learn more about specific assembly syntax later when needed.

When programming in masm, you're usually going to want to interact with the system in some way, move a mouse, create a window,show a messagebox, write a service, shutdown the computer, whatever. Windows allows you to do this via their system API and various other technologies, and that's what icezlions tutorials explain and give examples of, interacting with windows.  If you get confused about a windows api function(even though iczelion explains everything pretty well) you can always just google that function like 'Messagebox' and can find more information on microsofts msdn.