Gavi Levy Haskell
        Thursday 7:00pm-9:00pm in Ford 241 


    Julia Edwards
        Sunday 7-9 in Ford 241
        Monday 7:30-9:30 in Ford 241

Assignments
Go to the class Homepage for exercises, demo programs, reading assignments, and misc. information.

Introduction: CSC231, Microcomputers and Assembly Language, is a 4-credit course required for the Computer Science major and is an elective for Engineering. It is usually offered in the fall, and is the third computer course most CS majors will select, after having taken CSC111 and CSC212, both prerequisites for CSC231.

Like CSC111 and CSC212, Micro and Assembly Language is a programming intensive class, where students learn how the high-level constructs of Python, C, C++, or Java programs are executed by the computer: procedure calls and parameter passing, stack use and recursion. The class is also an introduction to the organization of the Intel 80X86/Pentium family of processors, and to the architecture of the IBM PC. Students write programs that directly control the microprocessor and the different hardware components inside the computer,

The programming environment is Linux, and we use the NetWide Assembler (NASM) to assemble programs. Working on homework assignments will require using computers in one of several ways:

• Using a Windows or Mac computer and connecting via ssh to the main Linux computers of the CS department (beowulf.csc.smith.edu, or grendel.csc.smith.edu) as was done for the CSC111 or CSC212 classes.
• Using one of the PCs in the Ford Hall, restart it and select Linux as the operating system to access the NASM assembler.
• Installing Linux on your own PC, then installing NASM on it.

Prerequisites: Students should also have a good understanding of the binary and hexadecimal systems, which will be reviewed briefly during class.

Schedule: The class meets twice a week, and programming assignments are given regularly. About 10 homework assignments can be expected. There will be an in-class midterm exam and a final take-home exam. There will be a final project that involves research into another processor and its intruction set.
The course covers the following topics:

• The 80X86/Pentium family of processors.
• Data manipulation instructions.
• Binary arithmetic.
• Introduction to system calls. Input/output operations.
• Procedure calls.
• Stack operations and parameter passing.
• Arrays.
• String operations.
• Dynamic memory allocation and pointers.
• Unix internals. More system calls.
• Hardware interrupts and device drivers.

Textbooks:

On-line Textbooks and tutorials:

• The searchable, and indexed, NASM manual
• Paul Carter's assembly language tutorial. Paul Carter's page can be found at http://www.drpaulcarter.com/.
• The Art of Assembly Language (by Randall Hyde). It assumes a different assembler, and hence a different syntax for the assembly langauge, but has a lot of very good information, especially about how the Intel CPU works.
• The concise gdb tutorial
• Table of opcodes for Intel 80x86. 2-pages, concise.
• Glossary of Opcodes with lengthy descriptions