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NASM Examples

cs.lmu.edu

76 pointsnkurz12 comments

I think it is worth mentioning that the author's website[1] lists course websites which all seem to have similar notes about relevant topics. As an example, there's the Computer Systems Organization course[2] which has NASM Tutorial[3] page listed in notes which is much more suitable for actually learning assembly than the NASM examples. And, of course, there's a notes page for "x86 Assembly Language Programming" too.

Truly awesome stuff, definitely worth exploring.

[1]: http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/

[2]: http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/classes/sp/

[3]: http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/

A nice little page with some very helpful examples for someone just starting out with using assembly on Linux. (There actually isn't much that's specific to Nasm, though. Based on the page's title, I would have at least expected an example that demonstrated setting up a .bss section, with the special resd [et al.] directives, and some examples of Nasm macros, which have some idiosyncratic features. But that's just a minor quibble about the name of the page. The information that is there is plenty useful, and not always easy to find.)

Note that the linked site, cs.lmu.edu, has a broken IPv6 DNS record:

    $ dig cs.lmu.edu AAAA
    cs.lmu.edu.             3493    IN      AAAA    ::1

When loaded on IPv6-enabled clients, you'll connect do localhost:80 instead.

Seems like a good thread to ask, hope this isn't too OT.

I'm a CSE major about to graduate with about 18 months in the industry, mainly using JS/Java/Python. I've recently wanted to start getting into low level programming and wasn't sure where to start. I wanted to start with C and move up to C++ eventually, would it be worthwhile to start with ASM? Also does anyone know of any good resources for learning modern C? Is k&r still relevant?

I would say that learning a bit of assembly is still relevant. I wouldn't waste too much time working on real projects but having that base knowledge provides a lot of insight into how it all compiles down.

I am no where near a low-level programming expert. But learning ASM in correspondence with the x86/x64 instruction set really helped me understanding how computing works. All this with just simple stuff, for instance incrementing a counter every second.

If you do any significant programming in C or C++, you will be looking at assembly dumps at some point, even if only in a debugger.

However, in my current job, I range between CoffeeScript, Ruby, Java and C++, and the only time I've had to break out assembly was when optimizing a Java loop - I had to ensure the JIT was doing all the right things, like loop unrolling and bounds check hoisting.

There's "Learn C The Hard Way" -- http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ . It teaches you the essential, modern practice of developing with Valgrind right away.

I'd also suggest going though the exercises in "Computer Systems -- A Programmer's Perspective", which uses Linux, C and some assembler. http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ Good C programming is mostly about good computer science, because the C language is small but you operate close to the metal.

K&R remains a marvel of concision, but its blithe, unskeptical usage of the C standard library is outdated and problematic.

I think the best (or at least my favorite) thing about Learn C The Hard Way was an extra credit assignment of going through the K&R book and finding a way to break every piece of sample code. Talk about a learning exercise.

Assembly language is great and will teach you a lot of how the computer really works at a low level. Everyone should write their own asm optimized triangle drawing routine at least once. It's not something you need to learn every detail of - that's what references are for, but it's definitely good to have some understanding of. People talk about how you should learn functional languages like haskell as it will make you a better programmer, even if you don't use it. The same is true of assembly language.

Nice explanation, the overall layout and text-to-code ratio make it easy/fun to follow. I would like to see the finished post when all the TODO's are filled in. I would suggest to add "AMD64" explicitly to the page title for clarity.

This link seems to be broken :(

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