PC Assembly Language

Book Description

In the fifth edition of his successful text, IBM ; PC Assembly Language and Programming, Peter Abel thoroughly covers a full range of programming levels. This revised edition is designed to assist the reader in learning assembly language programming. It introduces the simpler elements of the hardware and the language, and provides technical details and instruction as needed. IBM ; PC Assembly Language and Programming Features The hardware components of the PC; Machine language code and hexadecimal format; The steps involved with assembling, linking, and executing programs; Writing programs in assembly language to handle the keyboard, screen and mouse, convert between data formats, perform table searches and sorts, handle disk operations, and more. Tracing machine execution as an aid in program debugging; Writing macro instructions to facilitate faster coding; Linking separately assembled programs into one executable program. The fifth edition offers a variety of new material, including more details on video components and video operations, revised and additional program examples, more information about protected mode, stack usage, addressing modes, as well as array handling. /p>

Reviews From AMAZON.COM

Not Good Enough For Beginners

This book is a required text in an undergrad class on Assembly Language that I was taking. I found this book to be too difficult for a beginner simply, not because of the sophisticated concepts introduced here but because of the errors and lack of explanation. The latter half of the book is essentially like a reference and provided no explanation most of the time. Even for the example programs given in the text, there was not sufficient explanation. I also found that most of the programs (particularly in the latter half) do not work at all. I could fix a few bugs in some programs to make them work, however, this is a time consuming effort. Unless you have a really good instructor who can help you with the bugs and explanation of the code, I will not recommend this book. While I struggled with this book and managed to get an 'A' grade, I would look elsewhere if I had to do it all over again!

Too concise for a college textbook

First, please understand that I purchased this book for a college class in assembly, but I am also a programmer with 15 years professional experience, and some of material is not new to me. I have read a great number of programming books, and with that said, this book has little value beyond reference. It makes brief mention of advanced concepts I am trying to learn, and then jumps elsewhere. The examples are hard to follow, and often to not provide instructions on recreating them. I am purchasing another book to supplement this class, as I will never learn the material from this book.