Whats a good place to start learning assembly?

Question

I need to learn assembly using SSE instructions and need gcc to link the ASM code with c code.

I have no idea where to start and google hasn't helped.

Answer 1

You might want to start looking through the chip documentation from intel Intel Processor Software Developer Manuals. Assembly language coding isn't a whole lot of fun, and it's usually unneccessary except in few cases where code is performance critical.

Given you are looking at SSE, I would hazard that your effort may be better spent looking into CUDA, using your graphics card to perform vector computations via custom shaders. That way you don't have to learn ASM, and if you are doing serious number crunching it could be significantly faster if you have good parallelisation.

Answer 2

This is a good forum to get started in; it's form MASM, but the people there will be able to help with what you need.

Answer 3

Do they have an assembly for dummies book? Not being sarcastic, those usually give good step by step intros using simple examples.

Answer 4

If you have a lot of time, i recommend you The Art of Assembly Language, a classic self-learning book from Randall Hyde. It uses an ASM-like language to teach you how to do some assembly. Maybe for already trained professionals it sounds like a waste of time but it's pretty good to start learning.