[geeks] assembly/architecture tutorial suggestions?

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 11:00:59AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> Yes, I'm strange.   I dropped out (burned out) of college halfway
> through a computer science course.  I then spent the next ten years
> (almost, so far) getting heavy work experience as a sysadmin.
> 
> However, I never once took an assembly language course, or even 
> anything that got *deep down* into stacks/registers/interrupts/etc.
> 
> High-level languages, I can do.  Machine-level, not yet. 8-)
> 
> Suggestions?  I should probably look for some older PDP books, or
> start out with something simple (8bit) that I can emulate on one
> of my existing boxes.... 

Getting a good book on it will be difficult - it might be best to hunt
around second-hand bookshops or university libraries, find a book, and
then buy the appropriate hardware.  There should be lots of books
available on Z80, 6502 and 6809 - look in the microcontroller and
embedded system sections - and the hardware is so cheap it may as well be
free.

If you want to emulate, how about MIX?  There are plenty of emulators
available for all platforms, it is well-documented both on paper and
online, and being designed specifically as a pedagogic instruction set
it's not going to suffer from the little weirdnesses inherent in all
real-world CPUs.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/

      Good advice is always certain to be ignored,
      but that's no reason not to give it            -- Agatha Christie