Mastering Turbo Assembler: With Disk

You really need to read Jeff Dunteman's book first to get the most out of this book. I found it to be very readable. He also explains the gotchas really well. You can't go wrong with this one. Too bad this subject takes all your time. The book is roughly 869 pages long in not so large type. Seeya!

"Mastering Turbo Assembler" is a great book! It teaches you to write stand-alone assembly programs in DOS AND Windows. The book is full of examples which are explained in detail. All the code is written in TASM's IDEAL mode, which is better than MASM mode. Tom Swan really stimulates you to write your own programs and that is the key to become a good programmer. So read the book and with the information it profides you must try to make your own programs in order to check if you really understand it.But I must make clear that this book ONLY teaches you to WRITE programs in assembly. If you need basic information about the architecture of the 8086/8088 family (how memory and processor works etc.) this is not a good book to begin with. If you want to learn assembly from scratch (as I did) I recommend the book Jeff Duntemann wrote; "Assembly Language: Step by step". With this book and "Mastering Turbo Assembler" you have all the information you need to start programming in assembly.

I taught myself assembly language originally from this book. Although it is quite dated now, it's still a great way to learn assembler. All explanations are clear, and the book has a nice organization. From here, you can jump on to more advanced topics, and catch up with the latest tech by reading manuals from chip makers, etc..This book is worth a look.

This book has the best instruction coverage, every 8086 insctruction is fully covered. It also covers the TASM assembler from Borland. Every directive is fully described. So if you are planning on doing your Assembly programming with TASM, this is the best Assembler there is. The book goes through pretty fast, I recommend you learn another language like C/C++ or Pascal. I would also recommend tobe familiar with Debug that comes with DOS. This book is not for complete beginners, sorry :( but it does a very good job if you are a little bit familiar with the Intel 8086 programming.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Tom Swan's writing style is clear and concise. If I could only have one book on assembler this would be it. The code is written using Ideal Mode but is easily adapted to Masm. I highly recommend Swan's coding style! I rated this book with a 9 because the book does NOT cover extended (32-bit) registers, nor the numeric processor, which you will need for any serious programming. Get this book and Morneau's "PC Assembly Launguage" for complete coverage