On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:21:49 +0900, julik wrote:

> I've got a similar problem as Jay, but in a totally different domain.  
> Having started as a script kiddo - what kind of book can introduce me  
> in the beautiful but-oh-so-scary world of things like bit shifts,  
> number representations, registers and that 0xF of them all, so that I

Wow, that's a tough one today.  When I did assembler (or machine language,
as many pointed out it should more properly be called), it was the next
natural step for a beginner too advanced for BASIC, and there were many,
many "ML for Beginners" books - in fact, I think I recall one titled just
that from Compute! Books.

These days, I'm not sure that there are many beginner assembler resources,
since it's more a tool of game designers, firmware developers, etc.  Also,
assembler is much, much more complicated these days, with multi-core,
hyperthreading, pipelines, caches, microcodes, out-of-order execution,
branch prediction, and what-not.  The 6502 had only 56 instructions (plus
some undocumented combination ones), and order and execution time were
guaranteed.  I imagine there's some college coursework material somewhere.

If you want to be totally anachronistic, you could download a Commodore 64
emulator, and find copies of the old Compute! books; I think at least one
of them is now a free PDF.  Look for Jim Butterfield, Richard Mansfield,
Tom Halfhill.

Just remember: $FFD2 is CHROUT, $FFE4 is GETIN, and $C000 is a great place
to put code.

-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer