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Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko

3.1 (8)

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Mastering Assembly Programming

3.1 (8)

By: Alexey Lyashko

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Intel Architecture

Processor registers

Summary

Setting Up a Development Environment

Microsoft Macro Assembler

GNU Assembler (GAS)

Flat Assembler

Summary

Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)

Assembly source template

Data types and their definitions

A debugger

The instruction set summary

Summary

Memory Addressing Modes

Addressing code

Addressing data

Far pointers

Summary

Parallel Data Processing

SSE

Biorhythm calculator

AVX-512

Summary

Macro Instructions

What are macro instructions?

An introduction to calling conventions

A note on Flat Assembler's macro capabilities

Macro instructions in MASM and GAS

Other assembler directives (FASM Specific)

Summary

Data Structures

Arrays

Structures

Linked lists

Trees

Sparse matrices

Graphs

Summary

Mixing Modules Written in Assembly and Those Written in High-Level Languages

Crypto Core

Interfacing with C/C++

Assembly and managed code

Summary

Operating System Interface

The rings

System call

Using libraries

Summary

Patching Legacy Code

The executable

The issue

PE files

ELF executables

Summary

Oh, Almost Forgot

Protecting the code

A bit of kernel space

Summary

Customer Reviews

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A debugger

We are almost ready to begin the process of instruction set exploration; however, there is one more thing that we have not touched yet, as there was no need for it--a debugger. There is a relatively wide choice of debuggers out there and you, being a developer, have most likely worked with at least one of them. However, since we are interested in debugging programs written in the Assembly language, I would suggest one of the following:

IDA Pro (https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/index.shtml): Very convenient, but also very expensive. If you have it, good! If not, never mind, we have other options. Windows only.
OllyDbg (http://www.ollydbg.de/version2.html): Free debugger/disassembler. More than enough for what we need. Windows only. Unfortunately, the 64-bit version of this tool was never finished, meaning that you would not be able to use it with 64-bit examples...