How to learn Assembly

I've tried learning even the most basic ASM, I don't have the attention span for it. I can understand it a little bit, but never write anything massive or complex. I can barely write an ASM program to output text. o_O

[JMI]

Katrin:

It's been quite a while since I reviewed the +ORC tuts, but they would certainly be helpful in acquiring a basic understanding of how assembly works. Less likely that they would help with actual assembly programming however. If actual programming in assembly is of interest, there are several good resources on the net. including: Iczelion's Win32 Assembly Homepage, found at: http://spiff.tripnet.se/~iczelion/ and the forums mention below.

Regards,

Originally Posted by Katrin

Thanks JMI, Iczelion is something like an epicenter/a must. Will check him. Btw you know what these letters ICE mean (instant code engineering?)??? (have googled once but didn't found a definition as i remember well so question still remains). Cheers.

Before the advent of software based debuggers, there was ICE (In Circuit Emulation). In those very early days you plugged your ICE hardware into the CPU socket and your CPU into the ICE so there was a layer of hardware between the CPU and the computer. Since the ICE saw the address and data lines it could in a way "look" over the shoulder of the CPU and since the CPU was getting it's clock from the ICE that's how single stepping and break pointing was done. Output was LED's for the data and address busses. Hence when this was abstracted into software you got "soft" ICE and so on. Before the advent of the 386 you didn't really have a very sophisticated way of building these very low level tools. Things are much better now, although the infrastucture sometimes gets in the way.

dcow

Originally Posted by nulli

What is this fowl word i hear? you want to learn assembly because you want to hack? ohh my god! Sorry but thats something i would expect from a skript kiddies mouth.

Programming in assembly is for the people who has a love for processors and their instruction sets. Not because you want todo hacking. Oh well.. if that is all you want todo feel free to go ahead. But the road to assembly is long and hard. Can you stick with it?

This board is entirely about hacking in the sense of your second paragraph. Hacking is to know the machine and its software to such an extent that you can give the machine capabilities beyond the mundane, or that your skills are such that you can resolve problems that others cannot completely understand.

BTW, thanks for the links. Incidentally, I started on the software side of things by programming self test diagnotics into ROM for circuit cards. All this was done in assembly of course, just not Intel assembly. And of course there was no such thing as Windows. So while the learning curve is long (including the Win32 API) I do at least have the basics.

dcow

[nulli]

Originally Posted by dcow

This board is entirely about hacking in the sense of your second paragraph. Hacking is to know the machine and its software to such an extent that you can give the machine capabilities beyond the mundane, or that your skills are such that you can resolve problems that others cannot completely understand.

BTW, thanks for the links. Incidentally, I started on the software side of things by programming self test diagnotics into ROM for circuit cards. All this was done in assembly of course, just not Intel assembly. And of course there was no such thing as Windows. So while the learning curve is long (including the Win32 API) I do at least have the basics.

dcow

The day i wrote that i had been up for 48 hours straight and i where generally a little pissed off about some things. Anyhow.. I know what this board is about. However, learning assembly just because you want to hack/reverse engineer is usually not a good starting point.

In my experience people who start in that direction doesnt come very far in the end of things. I started out with Basic and then Visual Basic before i turned to Assembly. The reason i started was because the basic language was to simplistic and i didnt like C either. Now ive been programming in Assembly for 3 years and my love for this language grows each day.

Assembly isnt really that hard to learn if you got the right head for it. But that depends on whats inside it. I wish you good luck in the world of assembly. Maybe you'll need it maybe you wont.

greets, nulli

Thanks Nulli,

things are going along with assy. I registered over at masm forum which looked like a good place. I'm using HLA and Ollydebug to get started. What I want to do is to use Kaspersky's book on Hacker Dissassembling to make the link to HLL's With practice and knowledge of Win32 API I should be able to get along pretty well in figuring out how Win and IE interact to run Ora Fin Apps which is my end goal.

Later

dcow don't use HLA, search around here or on the net and you will see why, or even alternatively, ask at the masm forum.

It is a basic question.
I know latest version masm is v8.x, and can get it from some sites.
Is there any relation with M$? Masm V6.x was distributed with DDK from M$.

Dcow, I also come from unix backround. I've done assembly with nasm/gdb, mostly for shellcodes, injection libraries and such.

I've just begun doing some windows stuff. The assembly is of course the same, but the way to access the system is different. For example in Unix the system calls are set in stone, where as in windows you have to use api calls thru dlls.

I would say Art of assembly (16bit) is a good way to learn assembler. The 32bit version uses HLA which isnt bad, bad MASM still rocks.

Perhaps, try to find another smaler book about 16bit Assembly and the jump to Icylions tutorials for win32asm. It worked best for me.