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Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers, 4th edition
Popularity Contest of One A quick search on Amazon, however, reveals that for the keyword 'Assembly' Irvine's book is still the bestseller. The fourth edition of the text tops the list and the same was the case with the third edition. The university where I teach uses Irvine's textbook for its introductory Assembly courses. We've used third edition throughout last year, and decided to stick to the third edition (with fourth recommended) during this academic year as well, just to avoid having students cash out for a newer version of the same text. Since this is a Prentice Hall textbook targeted mostly towards Computer Science and Engineering programs, welcome to the world of academic pricing -- the list price of fourth edition is $76.
Third vs. Fourth
The first natural thing to do is to see whether the fourth edition of the text is superior to 1999's third edition. Just looking at the table of contents, you can see that a lot of new material has been added, even in the introductory chapters. Furthermore, fourth edition has a new version of the first Assembly program introduced to the reader. Instead of the notorious 'Hello, World' example, it's now adding three numbers. Hello, World would usually be the thing to introduce first in classes with C++ or Perl being primary languages. However, in Intel Assembly the example just confused students more, since printing the phrase "Hello, World" to the screen involved dealing with interrupts, and that topic would not be covered until later in the course.
Irvine also got rid of his "Using the Assembler" chapter, which might be a nuisance for some of the readers and relief for others. The book comes with Microsoft ASM and thus all examples assume using MASM for their compilation needs. In my class, however, NASM has always been the compiler of choice, partly because it's easier to introduce to novice programmers who have not been exposed to Assembly before, and partly because of the tradition -- NASM was the compiler that previous instructors used, and thus was available on university servers and familiar to tutors in the labs. Vaguely named "Advanced Topics" chapters are almost gone and now changed into much more informative "16-bit MS-DOS programming," "Expert MS-DOS programming," "BIOS level programming," "32-bit Windows programming" and "High-level language interface." The last chapter of the book is now the only one bearing the name "Advanced Topics" and discusses things like "Hardware control with I/O ports," "Intel instruction encoding" and "Floating-Point arithmetic."
Some appendices are gone as well. The third edition included such topics as "Binary and Hexadecimal tutorial" (now moved to be a part of the introductory chapters), "Using debug" (tutorial on using debug.exe on Microsoft platforms to trace the Assembly code -- it's a shame the appendix is pulled out of the book, since now either students have to learn the commands for debug.exe themselves or additional class time needs to be spent on that), "Microsoft CodeView" and "Borland TurboDebugger" (both gone for good) as well as "Guide to the sample programs" (in this new edition, that successfully migrated into "Installing and using the assembler").
Except for the shocking absence of debug.exe tutorial appendices, the fourth edition looks much more straightforward and useful. Speaking of appendices, there are four of them now - "Installing and using the assembler," which few people ever bother to read when in class, "Intel instruction set," which is the mother of all useful appendices (in fact, I've seen good students get by on nothing else but this appendix), "BIOS and MS-DOS interrupts" and "MASM reference." The CD by the way, includes MASM, source code and macros for the book, as well as evaluation version of TextPad.
Academic value
Kip Irvine is usually accused of bringing up examples that confuse novice readers and trying to show off with his knowledge of IA-32 Assembly. Read the Amazon reviews to find out more. Personally I have never had problems with his style of writing. There were, though, some mistakes in the third edition of the book that would make an instructor pull his hair to pieces. Typos, grammatical errors and words that did not get picked up by the spellchecker were acceptable, but when the sequence of operations during code execution was described incorrectly, you can hardly be accused of being too picky, since you get students relying on the book for knowledge and being mad at you for flagging their code wrong on the test.
If you have the third edition handy, pages 234 and 235 describe the RCL and RCR operations, providing the incorrect order of operations and thus forcing students who use this textbook to learn these instructions to arrive at incorrect results when given a snippet of code to trace. Page 232 in the fourth edition now has the correct sequence of operations.
I would lie to you if I told you that I've read the whole book. Very few people would actually need to go through seven hundred pages, and some of the things discussed might never be useful even if you spent the rest of your life programming Intel Assembly 40 hours a week. But from the information that I got after reading the chapters that interested me (mostly introductory material and all chapters that cover instruction set and interrupts), the text seemed to present material in a clear and straightforward manner, with abundant examples.
A nice addition to Chapter 1 was an explanation of how virtual machines work, since the university uses Java as its core programming language. The second chapter goes on smoothly with careful introduction into the architecture principles and then switches into overdrive, presenting students with information on "Multi-stage pipelining" followed by reasonably simple material on "How programs run."
The book jumps into IA-32 architecture, although I wish that for introductory class the text would stick to 8086 architecture, and then have the 32-bit registers introduced. But generally it's a thorough and informative text for anyone deciding to learn programming Assembly language on Intel platforms, or just beginning Computer Science majors deciding to find out how the stuff really works as opposed to playing with high-level APIs.
The table of contents can be found at publisher's Web site. There's also a Web page for the book, where the author has posted some chapters in PDF format. The chapters published for free include Chapter 1 - Basic Concepts, Chapter 2 - IA-32 Processor Architecture, Chapter 6 - Conditional Processing, Chapter 11 - 32-bit Windows Programming, Chapter 15 - BIOS-level programming as well as Preface and Table of contents.
You can purchase Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers, 4th edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Unless you doing task switching MMX etc... then there's nothing that advanced in FP specificly.
Things like real-mode and protected mode programming would have been far nicer to see,
Advanced topics should be Ring(0-4), Virtual Memory and paging, PCI address space mapping and APIC.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I used this book in college for learning assembly. Still have it on the shelf. I was doing some work on FAT and partition tables recently and was able to quickly get the information I needed from this book. It wasn't in depth, but I didn't read more than two pages before I was on my way. Wish it was that easy back in the college days!
Amen! I am glad (and relieved) that someone other then myself feels that way. I learned x86 assembly about a year ago during my junior year, its fantastic, I really got a grasp on what goes inside the processor, which, sadly, a lot of CS/CE students don't have. I think that it allows me to write faster code in my C programs by keeping in mind how it translated down to ASM.
Its aslo handy to know for embedded systems.
Also, I used Kip's book and I fall into the 'cool book' catagory
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
When he started the class, he used Apple IIs. School wouldn't keep these around just for one class, so now he uses an Apple II emulator running on PCs.
hmmm, I don't know.
I agree that good programmers and engineers should understand assembly, if only because that means really understanding how a computer works.
However, I don't think it has to be the first thing they learn
Look at the way EE's are taught: You start with the basics of transisters, resisters, capicitors, etc and work your way up. If EEs were taught the same way as programmers, they would start with plugging cards into PCs with component theory being taught as an afterthought!
But no! Plugging cards into PCs isn't electronics, it's technician work. I think you know this anyway, but your analogy is wrong. If EEs were taught the same way as programmers, they would learn about amplifiers, oscillators, tuned circuits, logic gates, flip flops, etc.
Teaching assembly to programmers is more like teaching physics to electronic engineers. Most of them won't need to know it.
In fact the thing that destroyed my career in digital electronics was being forced to attend classes on the mathematics of three phase circuits. There are some things people should not have to experience.
But I agree, someone who claims to understand computers without at least being aware of the types of processes which go on at microprocessor level is a liar, and any self-respecting programmer or engineer should make it their business to have some knowledge.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I remember my first job out of college I wrote a little preemptive multitasking kernel in 286 assembly for MSDOS that I used to write a multithreaded spacecraft simulator with one thread dedicated each to I/O, electrical subsystem, state vector propagator, and telemetry. While assembly was a rite of passage for those of us who studied computers in the 70's and 80's, you no more need to learn assembly now than you have to learn set theory and understand the axioms underlying mathematics in order to understand how addition works.
People learn quickly if the things that they are learning are useful to them, and at the level of abstraction that people need to use a computer these days I would rather point them toward Java, Visual Basic, or even HTML as a first programming language (of course since HTML is declarative you would want to use a corresponding DHTML language such as PHP, JSP, or ASP to round out the imperative elements of the course.) But starting with assembly would just bore students to tears; they would drop out simply because they weren't learning anything of any relevance to their actual use of computers.
Assembly, like compiler construction and operating systems design, should be reserved for those who get some utility from the knowlege, or are planning on extending the field.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
- Computer Scientist standpoint: This says that you should never need to know about the hardware. You should be programming in sufficently high level languages like Lisp that keep you from knowing anything about the underlying architecture. Knowing about the architecture leads you to programming FOR that architecture, which is the first step towards unportable code. Also, most pure computer scientists are more interested in proving that their solution is correct that actaully solving the problem. These people often give lip service to the importance of knowing the architecture while simultaniously designing languages that no computer will ever be able to run and that nobody would ever ever want to program in (anybody have a spare Turing machine handy? Mine ran out of infinate paper tape.)
- C Programmers point of view: This places the high level language as more of a glue between the programmer and the machine. You try to do things in ways that are optimal for the machine so your programs run fast, while still trying to be at least somewhat portable. (and hey, if you get it wrong, there's always #IFDEF right?). Most professional programmers seem to fall in this category, as it involves getting much more work done with fewer inductive proofs.
I know I'm going to be flamed about the Lisp crack, but you have to admit, Lisp programs are portable.I read the internet for the articles.
Try looking at the 68K instruction set, or the Z8000 (or Z80000) instruction set. Nice orthogonal instruction sets, no special purpose registers (except for the stack pointer - A7 and R15/RR14 respectively).
Even better, look at the ARM instruction set. Every instruction can be conditionally executed based on the same flags that other archs (6502, 68000, ppc, x86, etc) use for branches. Heck, even the program counter is a general purpose register. If you want to learn on a simple ARM machine, start here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think Irvine's text was a good middle-of-the-road read. Duntemann's "Assembly Step By Step" was very informative and helped me learn some more varied aspects of assembly which Irvine's text was a bit short-sighted with...but otherwise, for a college textbook, it's head and shoulders above many others I've read. Uffenbeck, anyone?
The first time I took Microprocessors, my instructor actually recommended that we use Uffenbeck's text to learn x86 ASM. Thankfully, when I retook the course, we had Irvine's text to accompany it. Don't get me wrong...Uffenbeck's book is good for comparative architecture analysis and the hardware side of things, but it's useless for learning ASM programming.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Using one of my favorite shopping bots to price this book,
i sb n=0130910139
http://www.bestbookdeal.com/cgi-bin/prices.cgi?
I noticed once again that the UK price is about 2/3 the US cost. So it's cheaper to buy the book in the UK, and have it air-mailed across the pond than it is to buy the new book here in the states. This is not an isolated incident, but a systematic one. As a Masters student, I regularly find that UK textbooks are frequently about 1/2 the US price.
This smacks of price fixing by the publishing industry, akin to what we see the movie industry doing with movies.
Can anyone comment on how prices for US books are set and how much business they lose to people using the Internet to shop internationally?
Sorry it didn't float your boat. People seem to either love my book or hate it, but it's been in print for 13 years and my mail pile seems to think it succeeds for way more people than it fails.
A lot of people forget that this book has a gimmick: It's assembly for people who have never programmed before and know *nothing* about programming with *any* language. My experience tells me that people who learn the underlying machine before they get too caught up in data structures do better when they have to battle two hundred diverse APIs in the same project, which is the way things have gone in Windows and are headed in Linux.
People who know something about programming and about the fundamental nature of computing should skip the first couple of chapters.
The next time I rewrite it (and that's going to be awhile still, maybe another year) I'm dropping DOS entirely, and will rewrite it for Linux from one end to the other. I will also teach people how to make kernel calls and not apologize for it. If all you do with assembly is call clib, you might as well use gcc. Assembly really is its own language, with its own culture and assumptions and ways of going about things. It is *not* C, and thank God for that much.
I may also drop the foobies thing in the next edition. The mail's been mixed on that--though I'm still trying to think of a good way to teach hex to those for whom number bases other than 10 are a serious mental roadblock.
Thanks, by the way, for the mention here on Slashdot. The book's been around for quite a few years and doesn't get much press anymore, even though it continues to sell well.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
(jeff at duntemann dot com)
Our assembly class was based on some invention of the professor's. It used a virtual machine and its own language. It probably would have been better to use something like z80, but it was okay. For me the class was rather pointless except for the project to write an assembler.
We used the Hennessy book for architecture which is of course MIPS based. I thought that was a great assembly language for learning RISC and stuff like pipelining.
After college I taught myself Motorola 68k assembly. Wow! That is the most elegant assembly language I've ever used. x86 assembly in contrast is very odd and clunky. I'm curious what PPC is like, but I haven't studied it.
For Computer Science I think it is better to learn the general concepts such as memory hierarchies, superscalar design and pipelining, etc., and focus on generic 32 bit RISC architecture. I think that will serve students far better than learning x86.
If you're not motivated enough to learn any specific language, assembly or otherwise, on your own anyway, I think you're in the wrong field!
-Kevin