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Is "Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC" outdated for its purpose?

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johnbrad

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Is "Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC" outdated for its purpose?

I've always had an interest in learning assembly. I just picked up the above book at a library sale. Considering the title, its probably at least 20-27 years old, but, from what I understand, whether its an 8088 or a top of the line C2D, they use the same basic architecture. I'm gonna read it, as I don't want to waste the dollar, but will what I'm reading still matter?
 
Do you want to learn to read assembly or write it? If it's the latter, then you're best off immersing yourself in other people's writing of real products, just as the young Bach learned to write by copying his brother's scores.

If you want to learn to speak a language, you find native speakers and hang around with them. Same idea.
 
Programming in x86 assembly is outdated anyway. Unless you're writing very low level code (bootloader, BIOS level controller firmware, etc), you're not going to be doing much assembly on the PC. Embedded systems, perhaps - but not IBM PC clones. So, you're not going to find a whole lot of current books on x86 assembly.

But, that said, learning assembly language is a valuable skill. And once you understand how it works on one microprocessor, the skill transfers. New mnemonics, new instructions, different registers, but the structure and the concepts will all be the same. And learning on something as common as an 8088 PC has a lot of advantages too.

Read the book, try your hand at coding... it's a good learning experience. Don't worry about the book being old - the art of programming in assembly is just as old.

-Ian
 
Coding in assembly is a lot of fun, and gets you nice and close to the machine. I find the Norton book explains the subject matter very well. You will want to go through the exercises to get the most out of it, so you'll need to lay your hands on a x86 assembler.

I've recently been going through this book again myself. I had it back in the day, and I saw someone was giving it away on Freecycle, so I grabbed it. Mint condition!

To go through the exercises, I'm using ancient stuff - a PC 5155 running the IBM Macro Assembler. Even have the manual/binder and disks :) Partying like it's 1985...

Have fun with your assembly coding...
 
johnbrad said:
I've always had an interest in learning assembly. I just picked up the above book at a library sale. Considering the title, its probably at least 20-27 years old, but, from what I understand, whether its an 8088 or a top of the line C2D, they use the same basic architecture. I'm gonna read it, as I don't want to waste the dollar, but will what I'm reading still matter?
Click to expand...

I thought you were flogging Apple Macs? Yes, the later CPUs are descended from the humble 8086 in the same way that humans are descended from apes.

But if you know apes, you don't understand humans. Similarly, if you understand the memory models and instruction set of the 8088, you really don't understand much about the later Intel CPUs and the way they're used.

Come to think of it, the 8086 is descended from the 8080 and the 8008. So, if you want to go back to basics, you might start there.
 
Just for your info, this message has been reposted to six different forums on the Internet. Since this topic might actually spurn some interesting discussion, maybe it should not be reported as spam and be deleted, but be warned the original poster is unlikely to return. If he does, it will be for posting links to somewhere.
 
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