[Noisebridge-discuss] Orphaned event: Intro to assembly language on Linux?

[jim]

    Not orphaned yet. 

background: 
    On Tuesday afternoons in Turing, Robert teaches SQL 
from 4:30 to 6 PM (nominally); I'm usually there for his 
class as are a few others who've kind of developed a 
Tuesday-afternoon-learn-programming community (from 3 
to 4:30 PM is BASH shell scripts time, a class, not a 
study group). 
    At 6 PM the claim to the room goes to the C and ass'y 
group. Robert usually continues whatever he's teaching 
for a while. A couple of months ago by 6 PM we'd already 
have been into the C and/or ass'y stuff. 
    I make it a point to be in Turing at 6 PM on Tuesdays 
in case anyone comes in with interest in the C and assy 
stuff. There have been expressions of interest, just not 
in Turing at 6 PM lately. 

about: 
    I can teach the fundamentals of C pretty well for 
people with some programming or technical background but 
don't know C. I cannot teach assembler well, so I've 
branded that time as a study group, not a class, hoping 
expectations are lowered and we can share figuring it out. 

    As to C, so far, in truth, it's been a class, with me 
going blah blah and others listening and me trying not 
talk too much. I make sure to say "symbol table" in the 
first class so's to bring attention to the design of a 
compiler. I tend to say "token" a fair amount, too. 
    We got past pointers. We did not get bogged down 
exercising every last operator. We spent a fair amount of 
time looking at C code as expressions (pretty much, a C 
statement can be tho't of as an expression with a statement 
terminator). We didn't finish the todo list manager program, 
but that's because we got bogged down in alternate designs, 
which is a good thing. I'd hoped to cover typedef struct 
but we didn't quite make that--almost. 

    As to assembler, generally the plan was to exercise the 
most commonly used Linux kernel calls along with the most 
commonly used mnemonic CPU instructions and get an 
introduction to the use of nasm and its directives so's to 
provide a foundation for anyone who wants to get good at 
some part of that stuff. 
    we got a little start (with a lot of links). We 
developed one or two little programs that read and write 
stdio. The plan was next to write a program that converts 
between ASCII and int values and do basic arithmetic. 

    We found that combining assembler with C worked--each 
can help understanding of the other. 
    I liked it. 




On Fri, 2012-03-02 at 18:33 -0800, Corey McGuire wrote:
> Interested as well.  Need to get my chops back up.
> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 12:40 PM, jim <jim at systemateka.com> wrote:
>         
>            yes. this is a tutorial that's been on-going
>         since maybe april of 2011. it may be on-going,
>         depends on how the other guy's new job has blasted
>         him.
>         
>         
>         On Thu, 2012-02-16 at 12:08 -0500, Wladyslaw Zbikowski wrote:
>         > Anybody heard of this?
>         >
>         > Tuesday
>         > 18:00 to 19:30 or so, Intro to assembly language on Linux
>         and
>         > introduction to C programming, Turing Classroom ; we're
>         working on a C
>         > program that lets a user work with a todolist file: see it,
>         delete an
>         > entry, add an entry, modify an entry; we're interleaving
>         this work
>         > with learning the essentials of the X86 CPU registers and
>         instructions
>         > and how to make int 0x80 linux kernel system calls.
>         >
>         >
>         https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Category:Events#Orphaned_Events
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> 
> 
> -- 
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> Albert Einstein
> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo Da Vinci
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> there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
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