Review by Michael Heinzl AKA EH-Net Member Awesec

People often ask if they should learn Assembly language - if it's worth the efforts, and if it's a necessity in order to become a good penetration tester. Short and personally answered, I'd say certainly yes. If you are interested in areas like Reverse Engineering and Exploit Development, Assembly knowledge is a must-have. The second question which often comes directly after “Should I learn Assembly?” is “How and where to start?” One of the few given recommendations often points towards Randall Hyde's “The Art of Assembly Language”  (AoA) for which the second edition was recently published.

The revised >700 pages strong edition covers Hyde's High Level Assembly, short HLA, which was developed in order to teach Assembly language to students at university in an easy way without the need to know everything that might be necessary to know for real Assembly language. Therefore, it's not the real low-level assembly known by many readers, as it supports control structures such as loops and exception handling, and even OOP.

*Note: The Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manuals are no longer available to order as hard copy.