Advanced MS-DOS Programming: The Microsoft Guide for Assembly Language and C Programmers

I've been a DOS user for decades (? - yeah, decades...), and I've always wondered "How were those commands written?" Doing my own small utility commands in assembly, I could never reach the level of "code tightness" that the DOS prompt displayed... "Why is my COPY command 50K larger than their DOS COPY command?!?" This book showed me why... Ray Duncan's book must have been the DOS programming bible during its time. For those wanting to learn assembly, and the art of writing good programs, this is a definite buy - since DOS is nearly extinct, the price of the book will be minimal. If you're just starting with assembly, this will give you a reason to write ASM, with actual examples that work. DOS may be dead(?) but there are still lessons to be learned from its code.

This is definitely THE BOOK if you want to do some cool programming in DOS. No matter if you find yourself in the DOS Debugger or in Pascal or C++, you can easely do very advanced things by playing around with the interrupts. This book shows you excactly what you need.

OK, the two other jokers have had their fun. Seriously, Ray Duncan's "Advanced MS-DOS Programming" is a must-have reference for the Assembler INT 21h system services for MS-DOS based PC's. This is not a "How-To" book, but rather a complete reference manual. If you're trying to learn 8086 assembler, I'd suggest Peter Norton and John Socha's "Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book For The IBM PC", but keep Ray Duncan's book handy for the details.

If this book were in print, I'm sure it would be a good bu