Re: Which assembler (or compiler) to start with? (newbie question)

On Dec 26, 4:58 am, Marion <mche...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello all,

I'm going to be taking assembly next semester and I'm bored here
during Christmas vacation (imagine that).  :p

So, I thought I'd teach myself assembly and get a jump ahead in my
class and searched Google for free assemblers and lo and behold!
There are so many of them!

FASM, MASM, NASM, HLA...it's frightening.  I thought it'd be an easy
thing to find and choose but not after reading the descriptions   I
thought I should start with MASM then eventually do NASM?

Assembly is pretty universal in commands, aren't they?  Does it really
matter which one I start with?  I am a newbie just wanting to get
familiarized with the language and its' intrinsics (well the
elementary stuff anyway.)

Any advice is appreciated.
-m

http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/manuals/270950.htm
The above is recommended for its perspective on the embedded x186
processor. Especially the addressing modes, and register usage. The
info largely carries forward to the rest of the Intel line.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html
Look for MIXAL or MIXware.
MIX is Knuth's synthetic language for a synthetic machine. It's
possible your class will use a synthetic machine to teach assembly,
you should try to find out about how the class is taught. Sometimes
classes are taught this way to minimize complexity and instruction
set. Don't get bogged down with it, overview it. A few compilers and
interpreters are _implemented_ in a synthetic machine, which aids in
portability to processor architectures. JAVA, JVM is such a byte
interpreted machine, for example.

HTH.
Steve
.