Preface

The Assembly language is the lowest-level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way.

Unfortunately, the modern world of software development does not require deep understanding of how programs are executed on the low level, not to mention the number of scripting languages and different frameworks that are there to ease the process of software development, and which are often mistakenly treated as inefficient mostly because developers think that the framework/scripting engine should cope with the lameness of the code. The intent behind this book is to show how important it is to understand the basics, which are too often left behind a developer’s learning curve.

The Assembly language is a powerful tool that developers may use in their projects to gain more efficiency with their code, not to mention that Assembly is the basis of computing even in today's world of high-level languages, software frameworks, and scripting engines. The core idea behind this book is to familiarize software developers with things that are often skipped or are not given enough attention by developers and, much worse, by those who teach them. It may be hard to believe that the Assembly language itself is only the tip of the iceberg (unfortunately, the part of the iceberg that is hidden in water falls outside the scope of this book), but even it alone may highly improve your ability to develop much cleaner, more elegant and, more importantly, much more efficient code.