This well-written textbook for undergraduates is not just another assembly language book. It includes material on 80x86 hardware, machine language, and the DOS operating system, and an introduction to structured programming. The author has improved the book considerably over the first edition. It is more comprehensive and better written.

The book is well organized and covers all of the standard material for an assembly language textbook. It includes a detailed discussion of instructions for the 80386 and 80486 computers. The examples in each chapter are well presented with clear explanations. Many ready-to-run programs are included on the disk that comes with the book. Most chapters include programming tips that delve deeper into the chapter’s material.

The first chapter, “Introduction,” provides the background for programming in assembly language. Chapter 1 also briefly discusses the use of DEBUG, which is used in the early chapters to test the programs. The second chapter deals with the “Hardware and Software Architecture” of MS-DOS computers. Chapter 3 introduces “Assembly Language Fundamentals.” It provides the foundation for writing future assembly language programs. Chapter 4, “The Macro Assembler,” builds on this foundation to introduce the reader to writing, assembling, and linking programs.

The next six chapters cover the standard material found in most assembly language books: “Input-Output Services,” “Conditional Processing,” “Arithmetic,” “Numeric Conversions and Libraries,” “String Processing,” and “Macros and Structures.” Each of these chapters includes many program segments interspersed with the theory and several well-written assembly language programs that more fully illustrate the concepts in the chapter. Beyond the traditional material covered in assembly language books, the author has included directives like struc and record that can be used to extend the use of data structures in assembly language.

Chapters 11, “Disk Storage,” and 12, “File Processing,” provide a nice introduction to DOS and how to do file processing with assembly language. Chapter 13, “High-level Linking,” discusses the important topic of linking assembly programs with Pascal and C high-level programs. Again the author provides several good examples that help explain the concepts. The last two chapters, “Advanced Topics I” and “Advanced Topics II,” discuss additional topics like pointers, interrupt control and handling, .com and .exe programs, system hardware, and dynamic memory allocation.

Each chapter ends with a comprehensive collection of review questions and many challenging programming exercises. Appendix I contains the answers to all of the odd-numbered review questions. Students should find the review questions stimulating and useful. What is missing is a summary of the chapter contents at the end of each chapter. A list of terms discussed in the chapter might also be useful. The book contains a large and comprehensive set of appendices:

• Binary and Hexadecimal Tutorial

• Using DEBUG

• Microsoft Codeview

• Borland Turbo Debugger

• Guide to the Companion Diskette

• MASM/TASM Reserved Words

• BIOS and DOS Interrupts

• Intel 8086/8088 Instruction Set

One impressive feature of the book is the wealth of assembly programs. The book includes over 75 well-written, complete programs. Each program is well documented, and each routine saves and restores all the registers used in the routine. The programs are easy to follow. In case readers do not want to enter the programs, the book comes with a disk that includes all the programs in the book. I found a few errors and typos in the text, but they are not distracting and the programs seem to work without any additional revision.

I recommend this book highly for anyone who is interested in learning to program in IBM-PC assembly language. It should make an excellent textbook.