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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third edition (with fourth recommended) during this academic year as well, just to avoid having students cash out for a newer version of the same text.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.
the x86 command set doesn't magically change just because you installed linux. There's no such thing as 'OS specific' assembler.
So, int 21 does what on linux? What about int 2e on DOS or Linux?
"Most of the people I know have a love-hate relationship with Kip Irvine's Assembly Language for Intel-based Computers. Ask any student who used this textbook and you will either get a cheerful 'I've used it, it's great, I learned Assembly, and it has lots of useful examples' or resentful 'The book is horrible, hard to follow and full of code that is irrelevant to the contents of a specific chapter.'"
That's not a love/hate relationship. A love/hate relationship would be "I used it, it was hard to follow, but I learned Assembly once I finished wading through it. I'm glad I read it, but if I have to do it again, I'm going to commit Hari-Kari"