general

This book has a good opening. When I learn a programming language, I want to see a sample program as soon as possible. This book provides such a sample program immediately after a short introduction to hardware concepts. This sample program loads registers, changes their contents, and dumps them. One can type the program in, see how it works, and gain a good confidence for further reading.

The library procedures provided by the author are helpful for learning and debugging. Usually, programs in assembly languages are difficult to debug, and their execution is hard to track, even if debug software is used. For programs in high-level languages, one can easily insert into them input and output statements to track their execution. For assembly language, writing such statements may be harder than writing the program itself. With these library procedures, especially those for data input/output, one can easily track the execution.

The 4th edition of this book emphasizes programming in 32-bit protected mode. In this mode, flat memory addresses are used. Students do not have to convert a 16-bit segment-offset address into a 20-bit address. This tremendously simplifies the addressing concepts and eases the learning. This book does cover 16-bit real-mode in later chapters when students are more ready for it.

A good textbook must be easy for reading as well as for reference. This book has both features. It starts with short explanations, uses excellent diagrams, and discusses comprehensive applications for every topic covered. Topics are well classified into fundamentals and advanced, 32-bit Windows programming and 16-bit DOS programming, protected mode and real-address mode, etc. Important aspects of assembly language are all included, systematically organized, and well indexed.

I am a computer engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a little skeptical of the high price at first and the fact that Kip Irvine has the readers use his library of functions throughout the book (I felt I would learn fewer details). However, after already reading about half of this book, I can say for certain that using Mr. Irvine's code library really does aid the learning process by helping the reader/programmer focus on what's really important early on in the study of assembly language. Also, he eventually does explain how his own functions work, so we are definitely not cheated of the details.
I also love the relevance and vast number of the book's actual code examples. I previously bought "Assembly Language Step-by step" by Jeff Duntemann and, after reading the entire DOS section, still did not feel that I could really code in assembly language. That isn't the case with this book. The chapters, and each chapter's code examples, are carefully organized and well explained, and doing the programming exercises at the end of each chapter really helps.
As for the $85 price tag...well, it's supposed to be a college textbook, after all. So, with all its clarity and information, just feel lucky it's not over $100, as many of my *unhelpful* textbooks are. By the way, it helps to know and understand decimal/binary/hexadecimal numbers (topics such as "2's complement") beforehand, since they are all used so often in assembly coding. If not, that's fine. The earlier material just might take a little more time.

There is not such thing as "all-in-one" book. This book is not exception. But you will enjoy it, thanks to the author. For pretty coding style, for IA-32 protected mode examples, for high-level assembly features introduced and more.

Not at last, the book is well organized textbook and suitable for intermediate level assembly and computer architecture courses.

You can begin develop your own protected mode assembly code with this book and Negatory Assembly Studio as well in hands.