Assembly Theory Chapter 1

These tutorials focus mainly on OpenGL, Win32 programming and the ODE physics engine. OpenGL has moved on to great heights and I don't cover the newest features but cover all of the basic concepts you will need with working example programs.

Working with the Win32 API is a great way to get to the heart of Windows and is just as relevant today as ever before. Whereas ODE has been marginalized as hardware accelerated physics becomes more common.

Games and graphics utilities can be made quickly and easily using game engines like Unity so this and Linux development in general will be the focus of my next tutorials.

Assembly Theory Explained

Why use assembly language?

Why use the assembly language when the other languages are more human readable?

One reason is that it works with the CPU (central processing unit) in its native language. The native language is in fact machine code but assemblers have a language that is very close. This native language of the CPU is inbuilt and will never become redundant as many other languages have become.

Another reason to use assembly is that it is faster than that of any other language, because all the other languages are eventually compiled to machine code before they run. But their compilers are not able to produce code which is as efficient or quick as a program written in assembly by a human.

The language is also similar from one CPU to another. So if you've learnt assembly for one computer CPU it is an easy step to learning the assembly for any other computers CPU.

But for me and many others, the main reason to use machine code is because it gives the programmer direct access to all of the computers memory and also allows the programmer to use many functions that the other languages omit.