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Comment by skippyfish | Hacker News Reader

I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right?

But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?

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I own volume 1 and when it first arrived I dropped it on my foot and had to go to the doctor. I have not got around to reading it again. His original x86 ASM book was good though.

I also read his Write Great Code series and generally found it to have some pretty good advice, but it was also full of things like recommendations to never trust compilers and to write lots of arcane unreadable magic code to unlock ultimate speedy hacker cred.

That being said, if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.

Yeah, I'd second a recommendation of at least the first two volumes of Write Great Code. I've long suggested those to juniors who have come out of bootcamps, self-taught, or other backgrounds outside a typical CS degree and didn't have much exposure to lower level machine concepts. I was a bit let down by the third volume... not that it was bad per se, but I feel like the sw engineering process stuff it covered both strayed outside his core strengths and had been done better elsewhere already.

> if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.

Not bad advice, but the Fasm forums used to be pretty good for asking questions, no clue if they are around and active still, but there were a lot of programs people had written and even a few simple OSs(including KolibriOS) which had a ton of code to read through that mostly was commented. Once you get the basics it is pretty easy to do stuff, and most of learning is doing stuff.

His earlier 32bit book was pretty decent, but super windows focused, I wish a similar work using a reasonable syntax existed for Linux, but the linux equivalent(some kind of foundations of programming or something similar assembly book) used gas syntax which is like nails on a chalkboard. Fasm is also so much nicer these days to use(masm is neglected by microsoft, but is the tool the author has used for everything).

Have you checked out paul carters assembly language book. it is free online. i'm not sure it has stuff for Linux.But you can check. also , it may be , for sixteen or thirty two bit. since I noticed it online long back. sorry voice typing.

Edit: i checked. it is for 32 bit. works on Linux. and uses Nasm.

https://pacman128.github.io/pcasm/

> gas syntax which is like nails on a chalkboard

That's weird, GNU as should default to AT&T syntax. Maybe the author switched to Intel syntax by adding the .intel_syntax directive at the beginning of the code?

Volume 1 is actually a really good book. Randall Hyde is a great author on this subject. HN has changed a lot from what it once was. It's just filled with a lot of this kind of snark and nonsense. What else would you expect when the most common take on AI on HN is this insane idea that "LLMs are just like a compiler was?" But, its not everyone. If you're interested in this topic then I think it will be worth working through.

I’ve been concerned seeing this in too many threads.

A Marketing and propaganda rule is that the very first thing people read/see sets the tone for the entire discussion. If you get everyone off track right from the jump it degrades the entire discussion and, ultimately, the usefulness of hacker news.

I read v1. It's good, but I prefer Ray Seyfarth's book. Not much interest in v2 - I haven't touched Windows in nearly 20 years and this seems much less OS-generic than the previous volume.

this is what almost every hn post is: lowbrow reflexive/reactionary responses. it's been like this for years. try to call it out and you'll be censured by dang or one of the other police officers for being "uncharitable" or something like that <shrug>

Really? I have quite the opposite impression. HN is one of the few places I can come to where intelligent conversations can be found. Sure, sometimes discussions run off the rails into the weeds, but snark is rare, and when conversations stay on track, they often add significantly to the post.

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