[HN Gopher] The "good" assembly book of 1997 which carries a lot...
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       The "good" assembly book of 1997 which carries a lot of wisdom
        
       Author : nucatus
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2021-01-15 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | dragontamer wrote:
       | The graphics community remains one of the most intense
       | optimization-based programmers I've ever seen.
       | 
       | GPU Gems, ShaderX, GPU Pro, GPU Zen... there's so much
       | optimization to be learned from them.
        
       | adamnemecek wrote:
       | I tried reading it on the past. Most of it seemed out of date.
       | What are the good parts?
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | It's been years since I read it cover-to-cover, but looking
         | over the ToC and thinking back the following chapters stick out
         | as having enough general applicability (i.e. not tied up in
         | video hardware or CPU specifics) as to be less dated: 10, 14 -
         | 18
        
         | corysama wrote:
         | The details about assembly and GPUs are way out of date. The
         | good parts are the wisdom about how to approach optimizing
         | programs.
        
       | EvanAnderson wrote:
       | I knew from the title it was going to be Michael Abrash's book.
       | There is, indeed, a lot of wisdom there. I did most of my
       | recreational x86 assembler coding in 1993-95. I got the book when
       | it came out (an unwieldy tome in paper form) and poured over it
       | but, sadly, I never really did much x86 assembler after that.
       | 
       | There's a lot in the book that's dated, being very VGA-specific,
       | or specific to the x86 CPUs of that day. Even so, there are lots
       | of ideas in the book that transcend that. His advice about
       | optimization, and about how to approach problems, is timeless.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | His Zen of Assembly language from 1990 was also great. It's
         | actually Volume 1 but he never did a Volume 2 because it would
         | have been not very relevant by then. Not useful per se but
         | there's a lot of fascinating stuff related to the x86
         | processors of the era.
        
         | filereaper wrote:
         | Is there anyway we can update it with x86_64 or would that
         | invalidate the licensing of the book?
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-15 23:00 UTC)