TAOMLP.pdf

Just over five years ago, I wrote a tutorial on programming, in machine code, on Windows. Why?? I have been wondering that myself!

But seriously, the main reason was that I felt I’d had enough of exploring low-level coding, and wanted a guide that would bring me up to speed in the future, should I choose to revisit it. But I also wanted to give back to the resource I’d taken so much from, namely the internet. I owed all of my programming experience to tutorials on websites and knowledge in forums.

In the course of my learning machine code, I’d had to collect disparate information scattered around different places, and dive into dusty specifications and manuals which used strange notations they didn’t explain. There was a lot of sifting through extraneous details that nobody cares about, like 16-bit Windows or OS/2 or POSIX emulation. Certain concepts were not explained well, etc. I just thought that I might as well try and help the situation.

One of the resources I learned from was called “The Art of Assembly Language Programming”, so I named my guide after that. I realise now that it was, in turn, a reference to The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth.

The reasons why it’s been sitting around gathering dust for five years are quite embarrassing. Firstly, I’ve always been a bit reluctant to have an internet footprint at all. This is one reason why I never post anything on forums. But worse, initially, I was paranoid as hell about plagiarism—what do I do if somebody steals my work and passes it off as their own? And once I thankfully got past that, I couldn’t decide how to publish it—exacerbated by the fact that I had no already-existing internet presence!! So I made it a PDF, and then sort of stuck my head in the sand and managed to forget about it…

Anyway, now I’ve got a blog, I can get it out! So here it is: TAOMLP.pdf

I skimmed through it, and I’m surprised at how well it holds up, given that I was 15 when I wrote it. (forgive the humblebrag, I feel I’m allowed to be proud of this fact.) I checked for broken links, and I think the only one is the Art Of ASM. It was probably this: http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/.

I’m glad that I did it, because I barely remember anything about machine code or Windows executable formats anymore. But do I want to? I’m not feeling terribly enthusiastic…