Re: [Freedos-devel] Learning DOS assembly programming

[Danilo P. <dan...@da...>]

Hi all,

To follow up on Tom's advice:

1. Ralph Brown's interrupt list is a must. You can find it on DJ
Delorie's page: https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/  - the nice
thing about that page is: It's good old hand crafted HTML and renders
in every ol' browser, even Netscape 4 on Windows 3.11.

2. As I've written to Jim already, there's a youtuber called root42,
who has made several good videos on DOS assembly and he starts at the
very basics.

3. As tom wrote, using a debugger to learn what happens 'behind the
scenes' is important. Watcom C comes with a debugger, as do all the
Borland Compilers.

As a last advice: For most tasks using Assembler doesn't make much
sense. For most of the time it yields only little gains on the output
of a good C compiler while being very time consuming to write, so use
it where it makes sense (time critical sections, low level hardware
programming). Otherwise just use C or any other higher language.

Cheers, Danilo



On Wed, 27 Dec 2023 at 13:26, tom ehlert via Freedos-devel
<fre...@li...> wrote:
>
> Hallo Herr Jim Hall via Freedos-devel,
>
> am Dienstag, 26. Dezember 2023 um 17:42 schrieben Sie:
>
> > I actually never learned DOS assembly programming, but decided I'd
> > like to start.
>
> > What assembler do you recommend,
> for noobies, they are all the same: take NASM.
>
> "hello World" programmers don't need highly optimizing C++ complers nor do they
> have a need for macros.
>
>
>
> >  and where is a good place to start
> > learning about DOS assembly programming?
> get a book.
> read other peoples programs. with a little luck there are even comments in the source.
> while FreeDOS luckily is almost free from assembler nonsense, there is still enough .ASM
> to learn from.
> read what ASM the C compiler generates from your C programs.
>
>
> > Start with a "Hello world"
> > program and eventually move up to writing an assembly version of TYPE
> > and CHOICE, things like that.
>
> get the Ralph Brown interrupt list
> implement stuff in C.
> learn to single step your programs using DEBUG.
>
> learning to program (in any language) is mostly about reading and understanding,
> not so much about writing programs.
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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