By Paul A. Carter. November 11, 2003. I taught Computer Science at the University of Central Oklahoma for 10 years. During this time I taught an introductory course in PC Assembly Language programming. I grew frustrated at teaching 16-bit real mode programming and decided to change to 32-bit protected mode. However, I soon ran into a problem. I could not find a textbook that covered 32-bit protected mode assembly programming! So, I decided to write my own. I also did not want students to have to go out and buy expensive software for the course. I decided to base the course on the free NASM ( Netwide Assembler ) and the free GNU gcc compiler (however, any 32-bit C compiler would work). Another advantage of these choices was that students could use Windows, Linux or FreeBSD to develop on. The tutorial only covers programming under 32-bit protected mode and requires a 32-bit protected mode compiler. Protected mode means: memory addresses offsets are expanded to be 32-bits ( this allows an offset to range up to 4 billion. Thus, segments can have sizes up to 4 gigabytes ) and segments can be divided into smaller 4K-sized units called pages. Text is available in the following languages: French, Italian, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English.

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