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Foreword
Time passes. It was exactly 10 years ago this summer, back in July 1989, when I turned in the manuscript of a book called Assembly Language from Square One. The book was well received, but its publisher went belly-up only a few months after its introduction. That may have been a blessing, because the book was too short, had a few more errors in it than it should have had, and was printed on horrible cheap paper that ripped with almost no provocation and is now turning sickly yellow.So, I leapt on the chance to do the book over and publish it with a real publisher, the most venerable John Wiley & Sons, who (as their T-shirts say) has been totally awesome since 1809. It was thoroughly rewritten and became a new book with a new title, and went on the shelves in September of 1992. Time passes, but in a world where the life of a computer book may well be eight months or less, Wiley kept the first edition of Assembly Language Step-by-Step in print for eight years, from 1992 to 2000.In that time it has probably sold more copies than any other single assembly language book, and I've received hundreds of letters of advice, corrections, suggestions, and simple, "Hey, this is cool!" compliments. Thanks to you all for taking the time to write. It means a lot to me. It's unclear how long this second edition will remain in print, but as long as people keep buying it (and telling me it's been useful to them), I suspect that either this edition or one to follow will remain available.Time passes. And before we get into the book proper, there's something else I wanted to relate. On July 8, 1999, my sister Gretchen Duntemann Roper found that Kathleen Duntemann had died peacefully in her sleep in Chicago, almost 10 years to the day since I had completed Assembly Language from Square One, which was also dedicated to her. She kept both books on her coffee table and would show them to anyone who came to visit, even though she never had a computer and probably never understood what assembly language was. She was my aunt and godmother, my father's sole sibling, who sang my ABCs to me and demanded that I be admitted to Adler Planetarium in Chicago when I was six, even though the rules at that time demanded that children be seven to attend the sky show. "Name the planets for the nice man," she told me, and I did, and when I had gone through all the planets I started in on the constellations. I got in, because she believed in me. And she was there through every other major milestone in my life: First Communion, Confirmation, wedding, my father's illness and death, years and years of Christmases and Thanksgivings and birthdays, always with treats for the dog and stories to tell, with a quick Irish wit and a generous heart-and truly I cannot and will not ever forget her.I say this only because so many of you are considerably younger than I, and may forget in the fever of young life: Time passes, and so do the people who believe in us, and urge us through the walls as we hit them so that we may arrive at midlife with something to show for it. Fathers and mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles can add immeasurably to our lives, and often do, even when we're too busy to notice. Cherish them while you have them, because cherishing them after they're gone is a lonely business indeed.In the meantime, having been talking about assembly language in one book or another for 10 years, I've decided to make it 20. As long as there will be PCs, there will be assembly language. Stay tuned. The year 2009 will be here before you know it.
