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Most introductory books on programming frustrate me to no end. At the end of them you can still ask "how does the computer really work?" and not have a good answer. They tend to pass over topics that are difficult even though they are important. I will take you through the difficult issues because that is the only way to move on to masterful programming. My goal is to take you from knowing nothing about programming to understanding how to think, write, and learn like a programmer. You won’t know everything, but you will have a background for how everything fits together. At the end of this book, you should be able to do the
following:
• Understand how a program works and interacts with other programs
• Read other people’s programs and learn how they work
• Learn new programming languages quickly
• Learn advanced concepts in computer science quickly
I will not teach you everything. Computer science is a massive field, especially when you combine the theory with the practice of computer programming. However, I will attempt to get you started on the foundations so you can easily go wherever you want afterwards.
This book teaches assembly language for x86 processors and the GNU/Linux operating system. Therefore we will be giving all of the examples using the GNU/Linux standard GCC tool set. If you are not familiar with GNU/Linux and the GCC tool set, they will be described shortly. If you are new to Linux, you should check out the guide available at http://rute.sourceforge.net/ What I intend to show you is more about programming in general than using a specific tool set on a specific platform, but standardizing on one makes the task much easier.
In this book we will learn assembly language, although we will cover a bit of high-level languages. Hopefully by learning assembly language, your understanding of how programming and computers work will put you a step ahead.
Most introductory books on programming frustrate me to no end. At the end of them you can still ask "how does the computer really work?" and not have a good answer. They tend to pass over topics that are difficult even though they are important. I will take you through the difficult issues because that is the only way to move on to masterful programming. My goal is to take you from knowing nothing about programming to understanding how to think, write, and learn like a programmer. You won’t know everything, but you will have a background for how everything fits together. At the end of this book, you should be able to do the
following:
• Understand how a program works and interacts with other programs
• Read other people’s programs and learn how they work
• Learn new programming languages quickly
• Learn advanced concepts in computer science quickly
I will not teach you everything. Computer science is a massive field, especially when you combine the theory with the practice of computer programming. However, I will attempt to get you started on the foundations so you can easily go wherever you want afterwards.
This book teaches assembly language for x86 processors and the GNU/Linux operating system. Therefore we will be giving all of the examples using the GNU/Linux standard GCC tool set. If you are not familiar with GNU/Linux and the GCC tool set, they will be described shortly. If you are new to Linux, you should check out the guide available at http://rute.sourceforge.net/ What I intend to show you is more about programming in general than using a specific tool set on a specific platform, but standardizing on one makes the task much easier.
In this book we will learn assembly language, although we will cover a bit of high-level languages. Hopefully by learning assembly language, your understanding of how programming and computers work will put you a step ahead.
