Chapter 10: Bits, Flags, Branches, and Tables Easing into Mainstream Assembly Programming

Overview

You don't take off until all your flight checks are made.

That's the reason that we haven't done a lot of instruction arranging in this book up until here, now that we are in the last quarter of the book. I've found that machine instructions aren't the most important part of assembly language programming. What's most important is understanding your machine and your tools and how everything fits together. Higher-level languages such as Pascal and Modula-2 hide much of those essential details from you. In assembly language you must see to them yourself. For some reason, authors of previous beginner books on assembly language haven't caught on to this fact.

This fact (in fact) was the major motivation for my writing this book.

If you've digested everything I've said so far, however, you're ready to get in and understand the remainder of the x86 instruction set. I won't teach it all in this book, but the phrase ready to understand is germane. You can now find yourself a reference and learn what instructions I don't cover on your own. The skills you need to build programming expertise are now yours, and if this book has accomplished that much, I'd say it's accomplished a lot.

So, let the fun begin.