Poised Solutions Tech Library

Assembly coding is a one to one mapping of machine code instructions using mnemonics to aid human coding. Assembly is used where performance or a small size is critical. An understanding of assembly coding can also benefit when coding in higher level languages, everything reduces to machine code at some point, realising this and being able to comprehend the actual code being operated upon is invaluable when solving, profiling and analysing.

Assembly Developer

Poised Solutions is an Assembly Developer, and offers assembly development as part of the various Development services in the Poised Solutions IT Practice. Assembly Development is not widely practiced in modern Development, primarily because it is a hard discipline to master and the Software Development life cycle can take a bit longer than higer level languages, but there are many uses for assembly: Ultra High Speed Trading systems, is perhaps the more exotic, and there is device drivers, and embedded devices where space and performance is at a premium. Understanding assembly well, stands one in good stead for any of the other Programming Langauges as they all ultimately have to reduce to native code at some point.

Assembly is also very useful for compiler development and coding tools, and some interesting books on that matter can be found in the system coding tools section of the Poised Solutions Library. Coding Philosophy books also tend to make reference to assembly, so a few of those books may also be of use to those wishing to know more about the art of assembly development, assembly is the underlying source of computer programming.

Assembly Book Reviews

Assembly Language Programming in Linux

Assembly Language Programming in Linux is a good introduction to using Intel syntax and NASM on IA-32 systems. The book covers the basics of CPU architecture from a programmer's perspective, an introduction to Linux, and full coverage of the IA-32 instruction set.

Programming from the Ground Up

ARM Assembly Language