Summary

By now, we have reviewed three different assemblers: Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM), this is an integral part of Visual Studio, GNU Assembler (GAS), this is the default backend for GNU Compilers Collection (GCC), Flat Assembler (FASM), this is a standalone, portable, flexible, and powerful assembler.

Although we will be using FASM, we may still refer to the other two from time to time, when the need arises (and it will).

Having an installed and working assembler, we are ready to proceed to Chapter 3, Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), and start working with the Assembly language itself. There is a long road ahead, and we have not made the first step yet. In Chapter 3, Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), we will go through the instruction set architecture of Intel processors, and you will learn how to write simple programs for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64-bit.