The Assembly Programming Master Book

Rating:
Summary: Good, but difficult
Review: I'm like A-List Publishing books, but this book is difficult. Excellent code with bad cemments.


Rating:
Summary: A warning
Review: There is no source code available for this book - at least that I can find anywhere; the email address given on the back of the book is dead and the publisher's site is out of date - not even listing the book itself.
So, if you're going to use the book, be prepared for an awful lot of typing ... or pay a visit to Iczelion's Win32ASM site - you'll find plenty to interest you there.

Rating:
Summary: The "Lost Art" of Win32 Assembly Language Revisited.
Review: When I first started developing commercial software for microcomputers in the 1980's, assembly language was the *only* way to create the best applications. As desktop computers became more powerful, high-level languages like C and Pascal became the tools of choice for many developers who preferred ease-of-maintenance over speed. However, some of the careless spaghetti code I have seen makes the equating of high-level-languages with ease-of-maintenance debatable, but I digress. And of course, before the advent of affordable graphics accelerator cards, game developers held on to assembly language as the best way to squeeze every last drop of bandwidth from the CPU. Michael Abrash's "Graphics Programming Black Book" provided a good reference source for these techniques.

Today, with Assembly Language seemingly relegated to device drivers and embedded software while C++, Java, Visual Basic, C# and .Net generate ever more bloated and cumbersome applications, "The Assembly Programming Master Book" brings us back down to earth-or, more accurately, back down to the bare metal. This book does not teach the reader how to program in Intel Assembly Language; neither does it teach how to program the Win32 API. There are plenty of other books that cover those subjects. Instead, the author dedicates himself to showing how the latest Win32 applications can be implemented from pure Assembly Language. Therefore, knowledge of Intel Assembly Language and the Win32 API are prerequisites. This is not called a "master book" for nothing.

The author first covers many subjects like resources, text output, some graphics, file I/O, the timer, multitasking / concurrency, DLLs, network and system programming. He discusses enough material so that the reader can find out for himself the things not readily explained in the text. The author then discusses debugging, code analysis, driver development as well as disassembling and interfacing with compiled code from high-level languages. Please understand that all of these so-called "hacker" techniques are necessary when programming at this level in the system.

My latest software development efforts, involving a lot of video stream processing, have drawn me back into the heavy use of Assembly Language. This book comes as a welcome addition to my library. It is not for everybody; script kiddies need not apply. Yet, even if you have no plans to write an entire application in Assembly Language, "The Assembly Programming Master Book" provides a lot of useful information about what goes on "under the hood" in the Windows operating system.