The Art of Assembly Language

1.5 The Environment for This Volume

Although this book presents generic information, parts of the discussion will necessarily be specific to a particular system. Because the Intel Architecture PCs are, by far, the most common in use today, this book will use that platform when discussing specific system-dependent concepts. However, those concepts will still apply to other systems and CPUs (for example, the PowerPC CPU in the Power Macintosh or some other RISC CPU in a Unix box) though you may well need to research the solution for your specific platform when an example does not explicitly apply to your system.

Most examples appearing in this book run under both Windows and Linux. This book attempts to stick with standard library interfaces to the operating system (OS) wherever possible, and it makes OS-specific calls only when the alternative is to write 'less than great' code.

Most of the specific examples in this book run on a late-model Intel Architecture (including AMD) CPU under Windows or Linux, with a reasonable amount of RAM and other system peripherals normally found ona late-model PC. The concepts, if not the software itself, will apply to Macs, Unix boxes, embedded systems, and even mainframes.