Afterword: Where to Go from Here?
After you have worked your way through this book, you have mastered the basics of modern assembly programming. The next step depends on your needs. This afterword contains some ideas.
Security analysts
can use the acquired knowledge to study malware, viruses, and other ways to break into computers or networks. Malware, in binary format, tries to get into computers and networks. You can take this binary code, reverse engineer it, and try to figure out what the code is doing. You would, of course, do that in an isolated lab system. Study how to reverse engineer and acquire the necessary tooling. You should consider learning ARM assembly for analyzing code on smartphones.
As a
higher-level language programmer
, you may consider building your own library of high-speed functions to be linked with your code. Study how you can optimize code; the code in this book was not written for high performance but for illustration purposes. In the book, we referred to a couple of texts that can help you write optimized code.
If you want a thorough understanding of the Intel processors, download the Intel manuals and study them. There is a lot of interesting information to digest, and knowing how the hardware and software works together will give you an edge in developing system software or diagnosing system crashes.
As a higher-level language programmer with a grasp of assembly language, you are now better equipped to debug your code. Analyze your
.obj
and
.lst
files and reverse engineer your code to see what happens. See how your compiler converts your code into machine language. Maybe using other instructions are more efficient?