From: "Tony Ingenoso" 

I use Borland's old DOS Turbo Debugger constantly.  It has a CPU window
where you can assemble instructions on the spot, see how large/small it is,
and
then test out little fragments directly by stepping through them.  TD is a great
learning and development tool.

Intel produced Programming References for all their various CPU's.  If you know
someplace where Intel is hawking their parts, the tech sales reps will have these
manuals.  Usually their is a pair a H/W ref and a programming ref and maybe an
OS writers guide.

Deep insight can be had from absorbing Michael Abrash's Zen of Assembler
books.  They are out of print and hard to find though.  The first ZoA
covered
mainly the 8088, but is still useful as it provides the "mindset"
one needs to do
this stuff at an above average level.  Lots of people can scribble down
some assembler code, not so many can do it really effectively - Abrash will
guide you
to some real revelations about high performance code.

A google search of the web will turn up a bunch of x86 assembler tutorial sites.

Which assembler to use?  There's a slew of them with all sorts of varying
syntaxes.  If you learn the CPU architecture well, learning the oddness of
some different assembler is not hard, just annoying.

The assembler Linux is mostly using uses the old AT&T type syntax and
you put operands in reverse order than with Microsoft MASM or Borland's
TASM.

ex. GAS (GNU )     movl  %edi,%ebx   <- EBX=EDI
     MASM/TASM   movl  ebx,edi    <- EBX=EDI

There's probably at least a half dozen x86 assemblers in common use.

GAS, MASM, TASM, WASM (watcom), Arrow, NASM, A86,etc

In pinch, a small DOS app can be produced with DEBUG - it has a small brain
dead 8086 assembler built in and the ability to write out the code you
scribbled.  I've had to do this on a job where the client was too cheap to
buy real development tools and I needed a gizmo to do some trivial little
task that a BAT file couldn't do.

"Hrvoje Mesing"  wrote in
message news:4277b9d8{at}w3.nls.net...
>
> Ok, as I see, everybody here understand asm and architecture of x86.
> What about debugging ?
> Anyone debug Windows application, services, protocols, processes, etc. ?
> Anyone can prefer any book about newbie debugging, etc. ? + asm book and
> which asm to use ?
>
> Thank You,
>
>
> ---
> M.
>
>

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