'Assembly' is just a way to represent machine code in text files. The McGraw Hill Computer Science series book 'Computer Architecture' did a good job of creating a fictional processor and then designing the machine code for it. Start with a computer architecture introduction. Two added advantages of these over 'theoretical' assembly language learning are that-Ī) You are doing something with a real-scenario implementation, so you're surely hooked.ī) You can eventually mold a business model around it if you end up with something really innovative. You could start with embedded robotics, another viable hobby could be IoT application. Since you know C, you can start with some serious gdb usage, as mentioned by Then find your sweet spot between these two ends. It is like treading a land-mined area and nothing can replace the knowledge of the fundamental terrain- the architecture.ģ.

Knowing how the microprocessor works comes really handy while coding assembly as you can't 'catch exceptions' out there. One of the best sources for me has been. Added concepts are- pipelining, segmentation etc. It too builds upon the architectures mentioned previously. Once you grasp the fundamentals, you can move onto x86. i suggest diving a little into a processor architecture first.

You can also do the same thing with the JVM and look at its JIT-generated machine code with the '-XX:+PrintCompilation' option:ġ. You also then start to notice things like the operating system specific application binary interfaces (ABI):Īnd object file formats such as ELF that's used in Linux: The x86 manuals are, for example, available here: Of course, to do that, you need to find the manual for your machine architecture. Start experimenting by writing out C constructs like functions, loops, switch statements, etc., and just looking at what the generated code looks like. If you already know C, you can start out by looking at the machine code generated by your compiler with 'objdump -d' on Linux and 'otool -tV' on Mac.

Learn assembly on mac