Green horn of MASM

[youngman]

Hi Guys !

i'm new to Assembly Language and i was searching tutorial over internet to learn about it but what i found was that the tutorial seems aims to intermediate or advanced users. It is hard for me to learn and understand the ground or very basic of Assembly Language. I need you guys to advise me on  how to learn assembly language in a effective manner. Maybe you can share the experience with me ?

I was searching the reference books of over amazon but i was no idea which book is suitable for me and i hope you guys can help me.

Thanks

[PBrennick]

Search for Charles Petzold, he will not steer you wrong.  I guess by green horn you mean no experience but have you ever heard of the green oak woods where the Nightingale sings?

Paul

[youngman]

Thanks ! Paul

[PBrennick]

 :8)

[James Ladd]

I'd also recommend Professional Assembly Language  - Wrox Press.
This is a good starting guide and covers Linux and Gnu Tools which may appeal to you.
The sytax for examples is at&t which can be confusing but the words are worth it.

[w0lfshad3]

If absolutely new to assembly you could start from here:

http://win32assembly.online.fr/tutorials.html

The concept is called win32 assembly or protected mode assembly and its easy.

It requires win32 API knowledge, Charles Petzold "Programming windows 5th edtiotion" is a good book on win32 API but you can get along w/o it as those tutorials are pretty self explanatory.

I started with this:

http://www.drpaulcarter.com/pcasm/ it can propel you pretty fast into the world of assembly alltough you would want to work in masm not nasm.

A visual IDE: http://www.radasm.com/ works with a lot of assemblers and even HLLs

Intel reference books on arhitecture, assembly mnemonics(syntax) etc:

http://www.intel.com/design/pentium4/manuals/index_new.htm

Use flashget's site explorer for example on ftp://download.intel.com/design/pentium/prodchng/, feel free to look at previous directories in the link by deleting on folder at a time from path. Take all this path: ftp://download.intel.com/design/pentium/prodchng/ , for the rest look at teh .html file first because most of the rest of the books you don't need.

Use these links as a manual:

http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/Page_TechDocs/MASMDoc/ProgrammersGuide/

http://web.sau.edu/LillisKevinM/csci240/masmdocs/#MASM%20Reference%20Guide

http://www.ray.masmcode.com/tutorial/index.html

http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs306/books/artofasm/toc.html

Don't forget to destroy the world with the "Hello World" of Death and grow and incompassable ego according to hutch & CO.mpany.

Assembly is easy it just takes a while to learn, and material to learn from.
Here is another forum as well: http://www.asmcommunity.net/board/index.php
Here is a portal: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
And the famous Art of Assembly: http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs306/books/artofasm/toc.html
Dont' be afraid to ask questions, alltough there are a lot of jerks out there, there are people who will help you.
Don't feel overwhelmed by all of what you'll see: if you have the patience in 1 month or less i guarantee you will become pretty fluent in it and more self confident.

There are quite an assortment of debuggers out there, recomandable is OLLYDBG, SoftICE can be found out there, IDA is not free but its quite a piece of work.

Oh and don't worry about the "very basic" of assembly; most people when hearing of that will think historically, and real mode programming and DOS are pretty much dead on the PC world of windows and protected programming wich is all the more easy because memory is flat(well it will tell you all about that on every beginning of an protected mode programming tutorial. The very basic of protected mode assembly is learning about using mnemonics, the stack, the fpu, interlacing assembly  with your code by writing .dll s libraries inlining code or calling procedures from other languages and learning to debug of course wich will help you in HLLs debugging as well.

[youngman]

Thanks James, wOLFshad3 for informing me all the great information and website and i think it's time for me to "digest" all the information before i ask my questions.