I used the fourth edition for a Computer Architecture course. I really enjoyed this book at the time, though I must admit I did not read it from cover to cover - I only read the stuff I needed when it came time to do the assignments. I found the information in the book quite easily, so maybe the organization was changed when going from third edition to fourth edition. If you're interested, I would recommend checking it out, it's not nearly as bad as some reviewers claim.

There is not such thing as "all-in-one" book. This book is not exception. But you will enjoy it, thanks to the author. For pretty coding style, for IA-32 protected mode examples, for high-level assembly features introduced and more.

Not at last, the book is well organized textbook and suitable for intermediate level assembly and computer architecture courses.

You can begin develop your own protected mode assembly code with this book and Negatory Assembly Studio as well in hands.

A very competent introduction to assembly programming, regardless of the platform, but great because it can probably be used with your personal computer. After a quick install off the included CD, you'll be coding and assembling your own programs in no time.

A background with digital systems is helpful - I am a computer engineering student, and I was already more than familiar with two's complement, AND, OR, and other logical operations. These topics, working with binary, are essential to assembly. However, though the book uses them a lot, it also explains them at the beginning, so pay attention.

It's very interesting all the Windows-specific things it covers: the author doesn't neglect the fact that Microsoft's assembler is by far the most used PC assembler out there, and goes into lots of MASM-specific topics. What's great, however, is that amongst the platform-specific ideas are general ideas that will work well in any assembly situation; that's an advantage of assembly, that it's so low-level it's very similar on different platforms.

I took an embedded systems class after taking the class that used this book. I felt very confident in my assembly ability, even though the embedded systems class was not using Intel processors, but PIC processors from Microchip.

By the way... I wonder if most textbooks are rated according to a student's experience in the class. Did the guy who rate this book down very low simply have a bad teacher who was really hard on his class, and then looked for problems with the book? Personally, I didn't find the lack of a debugger that bad, since I was understanding assembly pretty quickly right off the bat thanks to this book and my teacher's clear explanations.

I don't understand the previous reviewer's criticism, because I felt this book was really easy to read, and hit all the major topics that I wanted to learn. I read the whole thing cover to cover in one day.

Assembly language is for the hardcore who either really want to know how the machine works, or for those who really need to optimize their code (like wannabe game programmers). To really understand Assembly, you need to already be a good programer in a high level language, and you need to know a little bit about computer hardware/software architecture (virtual memory, paging, segments). It also doesn't hurt to know a little about compiler construction. Those are all major topics in themselves, and cannot be fully explained to novices in one book. Gotta learn the fundamentals first.

Anyone with a decent technical background should agree this book is a surprisingly painless and thorough introduction to a normally tedious topic.

Very robust examples, clear explanations, this makes it good for beginners. Some of the things that surprised me is his use of the i586 architecture. This is good for people who need to use semi-modern assembler code. That is, 586 is the architecture for Pentium (P54C), Pentium MMX (P55C), and all iterations above the Pentium line are able to read 586 code (difference is only in architecture, not necessarily language). Anyhoo, the book starts off with the basics: radix conversions, boolean logic, and then it goes into the assembler itself. It covers MASM (Microsoft ASM), so it's typically for Windows, if you're using Gnu ASM, you're out of luck. It's a good book to get a feel for assmbly language, if you're wanting to write ASM programs that tap into MMX, this book covers it as well.