General Assembly Topics

I was in high school when I learned to program in assembly language. Our home computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, which was based on the 8 bit Motorola 6809 processor. I picked up a book that my mother had bought, and began to read it.

It started out with several topics which, at the time, I felt were just theoretical and academic (and boring). I made slow progress though the first part of the book, and one day was horrified to discover that I was nearly halfway through the book and hadn't learned a single thing about the syntax of assembly language.

The fact is, there is quite a lot of ground-work and background information that is needed to understand assembly language. Details like stacks, bitwise math, flag registers, memory segments and hardware architecture that are hidden or play a minimal role in high level languages are the stuff of everyday experience in assembly language. The author knew that it was important to give a length treatment of these subjects before launching into the language itself.

The majority of these topics are important to nearly all processors.

Internal representation of data
CPU Architecture
Arithmetic
Binary Operations
Tests
Stacks
Memory Segments
Addressing techniques
Input/Output techniques