A Newbie of Assembly Language

[youngman]

Hi all !

The reason why I want to learn Assembly Language is I realized the fundamental is extremely important for computer programming and also every aspect of our life. Fundamental is like a base of a building, without a strong and correct way of construction and the building will be collapsed.

I hope all the friends here can help me to answer the questions as  below :-

1) Can we start our career by learning assembly language ? why ? how ?

2) What should I do If I want to learn the basic (fundamental) of assembly language ?

3) What are the resources I need when I want to learn this assembly language (basic level) ?
(any website ? books ? etc)

4) What assembler should I use ? MASM ? TASM ?  NASM ?  or ?

5) If I start by learning from this "16 bits Dos Programming" is it the correct way ?

I needs your suggestions in order to has a good and correct  way of start learning of assembly language. Thanks a lot.

YM

   

[Tedd]

Welcome to the wonderful world of puzzlement and insanity :green2
Okay, not really - there's plenty of friendly help and advice here, so stick with us and we'll beat you into shape :wink
So, to answer your questions:

1) You could, but there aren't so many chances these days, so you would be narrowing your opportunities a little. Exclusively asm jobs are pretty rare and specialised. Of course, it's very useful to have as an extra skill (like voodoo), but if you want to get into programming you should make sure you know at least one (or three) other high-level language quite well.

2) Read, practise, read some more, ask questions, practise, be curious and try the parts that interest you most, read.. Most people learn best through 'doing' so get yourself some good learning resources and then work your way through. Once you have the plain basics, follow whichever parts sound interesting - if it's interesting it's more fun :wink

3) Well, everyone has different tastes, so you'll have to pick which ones suit you best - there are lots of examples and tutorials to get you started. In addition, you'll want to make good friends with some references too - the intel instruction manuals (2A and 2B), and the win32 api reference.

4) Taste, again. But since this is the Masm forum, you'll probably get the best help from us with that :wink

5) It's not 'wrong,' but unless you have a specific need for 16-bit, I'd go with 32 - it's actually simpler! And if you need 16-bit, you can come back to it later.


Some links to explore:

http://win32assembly.online.fr/
http://www.drpaulcarter.com/pcasm/
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

[youngman]

Thanks, Tedd.