Readings in the text

• Irvine, Chapters 1-6

Handouts

• Demos 1-7
• PC hardware handout

Topics

• General
  • Binary data representation
  • Hexadecimal data representation
  • Converting between binary/hex/decimal
  • Logical operations (AND, OR, XOR, NOT)
  • Two's complement; representing negative numbers
  • The purpose and usage of ASCII
• PC hardware
  • CPU internals (ALU, control, registers, etc.)
  • Individual registers and their purpose
  • Flags and their meaning
  • Buses (address, data, control)
  • Other hardware (memory, disk, etc.)
  • Life-cycle of the CPU (fetch, decode, execute)
• Assembly Language
  • Advantages and disadvantages
  • When is assembly useful?
  • Assembly vs. high-level languages
  • Compilation / assembly process
  • Directives, instructions, identifiers, labels, mnemonics, operands
  • Special role of the stack
  • Declaring various kinds of data (bytes, words, double-words, arrays)
• Assembly Instructions
  • Assignment (mov, movsx, movzx) and its restrictions
  • Artithmetic (add, sub, mul, div, dec, inc)
  • Logical (and, or, xor, not, neg)
  • Control transfer (call, ret, jmp, loop)
  • Conditionals (cmp and various conditional jumps)
  • Stack Operations (push, pop)
  • Memory access (when to use brackets and when not to)
• Input and Output
  • read() and write() system calls
  • Converting between ASCII / binary
• Other system calls
  • exit()
  • Time-related (time() and gettimeofday())
• Other topics
  • Big-endian vs. little-endian notation
  • Data layout in memory
  • Purpose of sections in an assembly file
  • Purpose of Makefiles and how to write/use them
  • Accessing command-line arguments