Rating: 
Summary: Very good book indeed!
Review: I bought this book because I liked the fact that this is the most updated assembly language book for Intel-based computer in the market and the enclosed MASM 6.11 is a nice addition. I have read the book half way through and found this book is pretty good! The author, Kip Irvine is very responsive when I sent him an e-mail regarding advanced assembly language books.
Rating:
Summary: Really well organized
Review: I have bought a lot of programming books and this one is one of the books I have with the most examples. The compiler is a little fussy with some external commands but you can get a lot of support from the author. I have to do a lot of the exercises in the book before I come up with a problem.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a pretty good book, very complete and in depth.
Review: The book is very complete, and covers an extensive amount of information. One criticism I have is that I would like to see more extensive examples of uses of different instruction operands. In some places the examples are not entirely clear. But otherwise it's an excellent learning tool.
Rating:
Summary: Probably one of the better programing books I have read.
Review: The book is probably one of the better programing book that i have read. Very comprehensive, step by step on understanding assembly. It explains what is going on with the hardwar, the theorie, and also goes into the programing side. Its put together in a very orderly manner. The only thing that would have been nice if it had more full exsamples of programs in each chapter or an appendix, maybe just 2 or 3 besides the ones on the disc with line by line explanations of what is going on, using the material already presented on the chapter.I have read upto chapter 4 and I perty much like it. Well done book with a good appendix.
Rating:
Summary: Book Includes full copy of MASM 6.11 Assembler!
Review: I'm actually the author, but I want you to know that the book includes a full, professional copy of the Microsoft 6.11 Assembler, which normally retails for $60. Where can you get a better deal than that? Contact me by email if you have any more questions.
Rating:
Summary: Definitely useful book
Review: There is not such thing as "all-in-one" book. This book is not exception. But you will enjoy it, thanks to the author. For pretty coding style, for IA-32 protected mode examples, for high-level assembly features introduced and more.Not at last, the book is well organized textbook and suitable for intermediate level assembly and computer architecture courses. You can begin develop your own protected mode assembly code with this book and Negatory Assembly Studio as well in hands.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to assembly
Review: A very competent introduction to assembly programming, regardless of the platform, but great because it can probably be used with your personal computer. After a quick install off the included CD, you'll be coding and assembling your own programs in no time. A background with digital systems is helpful - I am a computer engineering student, and I was already more than familiar with two's complement, AND, OR, and other logical operations. These topics, working with binary, are essential to assembly. However, though the book uses them a lot, it also explains them at the beginning, so pay attention. It's very interesting all the Windows-specific things it covers: the author doesn't neglect the fact that Microsoft's assembler is by far the most used PC assembler out there, and goes into lots of MASM-specific topics. What's great, however, is that amongst the platform-specific ideas are general ideas that will work well in any assembly situation; that's an advantage of assembly, that it's so low-level it's very similar on different platforms. I took an embedded systems class after taking the class that used this book. I felt very confident in my assembly ability, even though the embedded systems class was not using Intel processors, but PIC processors from Microchip. By the way... I wonder if most textbooks are rated according to a student's experience in the class. Did the guy who rate this book down very low simply have a bad teacher who was really hard on his class, and then looked for problems with the book? Personally, I didn't find the lack of a debugger that bad, since I was understanding assembly pretty quickly right off the bat thanks to this book and my teacher's clear explanations.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic book!!!!
Review: I don't understand the previous reviewer's criticism, because I felt this book was really easy to read, and hit all the major topics that I wanted to learn. I read the whole thing cover to cover in one day. Assembly language is for the hardcore who either really want to know how the machine works, or for those who really need to optimize their code (like wannabe game programmers). To really understand Assembly, you need to already be a good programer in a high level language, and you need to know a little bit about computer hardware/software architecture (virtual memory, paging, segments). It also doesn't hurt to know a little about compiler construction. Those are all major topics in themselves, and cannot be fully explained to novices in one book. Gotta learn the fundamentals first. Anyone with a decent technical background should agree this book is a surprisingly painless and thorough introduction to a normally tedious topic.
Rating:
Summary: Good book for Assembler beginners
Review: Very robust examples, clear explanations, this makes it good for beginners. Some of the things that surprised me is his use of the i586 architecture. This is good for people who need to use semi-modern assembler code. That is, 586 is the architecture for Pentium (P54C), Pentium MMX (P55C), and all iterations above the Pentium line are able to read 586 code (difference is only in architecture, not necessarily language). Anyhoo, the book starts off with the basics: radix conversions, boolean logic, and then it goes into the assembler itself. It covers MASM (Microsoft ASM), so it's typically for Windows, if you're using Gnu ASM, you're out of luck. It's a good book to get a feel for assmbly language, if you're wanting to write ASM programs that tap into MMX, this book covers it as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Overcomplicated for the intro book; no debugger coverage
Review: A bad, overcomplicated and dull college textbook used in many colleges for the assembler class. Pretty boring and uninspired coverage typical of many college textbooks. It might be suitable as a reference but never as a textbook: the author has no abilities at all in distinguishing between important and unimportant material as well as material suitable and unsuitable for the intro course. For self-education I would recommend using old John Socha's book Assembly Language for the PC instead (it covers only real mode but this is OK for the introduction) or Assembly Language Step-By-Step Programming With DOS and Linux.
The only good thing about this book is that the CD ROM included with the book contains MASM 6.15. Again, the most bad thing about the book is that the author fails to distinguish between really important and redundant information and overload the book with an extra material. His approach is to add some predefined routines to assembler to make it more like a high level language. But at the same time he converts the language into a variant of C++: obscure mass of unnecessary details that overwhelm almost all novices. Without help of the debugger assembler is almost incomprehensible. IMHO for most students, especially for community college student for whom the book was originally written might passionately hate of assembler for the rest of their lives. So it does not surprise me that out of 17 chapters the author did found space to cover the debugger. He is too preoccupied with obscuring things that with making them simple. Actually CodeView in included on the disk and can be used for debugging the programs in 8086 mode: again I would like to stress that using the debugger is the only right way to learn assembler. Thus this is not a shortcoming, this is a real blunder and that's why I give then book only two stars: in my opinion this makes book really harmful book as it discredits the idea of assembler as an important language for any computer science student. If you want to compensate for this shortcoming it might be not easy as additional subroutines make finding the actual code not that easy. But you can use some tricks marking the start of the code with a special sequence of commands and then finding them. There are several debuggers for 32-bit mode as well. As author himself noted on the CD ROM: For 32-bit Protected mode programming, two excellent debuggers you can use are: - Microsoft Visual C++ Debugger - This is an integral part of Microsoft Visual Studio. Look for a tutorial on our book's Web page that shows how to set up and use this debugger. - Microsoft WinDbg Debugger - This is a stand-alone debugging utility that can be used to debug both user-mode programs and kernel-mode programs (such as device drivers). At the current time, this debugger can be downloaded for free from Microsoft's Debugging Tools for Windows web page. If this link becomes inactive, check our book's Web site for an updated URL.
There is an author website for the book. The first three chapters are available online.
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