Learn Assembly Programming the Fun Way

A discussion of games to learn assembly programming and why learning assembly is still relevant today.

Have you always wanted to learn assembly programming but think it looks too complicated? Here I will go through some ways to learn assembly programming the easy way while having fun.

Just to clarify, this is not intended as a way of learning real world assembly programming such as how to program an Intel x86 or ARM microprocessor.

No, this is about the basic concepts that are universal for the assembly code of all different microprocessors. The principles that help you understand how a microprocessor works.

Isn’t Assembly Coding Outdated?

Yes. So why learn it?

Even if you programming a high-level programming language, the code you write has to be translated into assembly code (or more specifically machine code). If you have absolutely no idea of how the computer runs code, then you have no good conceptual idea of how your high level code will perform either.

It is also a question of getting the satisfaction of understanding how computers work from a high level language all the way down to assembly code and down to the microprocessor executing machine code.

My interest in this began with teaching my kids programming. I am teaching them some Julia programming, Scratch and MakeCode…