Stephen Smith - Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming: ARM Processor Coding

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5286-4 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

If you really want to learn how a computer works, learning Assembly language is a great way to get into the nitty-gritty details. The popularity and low cost of the Raspberry Pi provide an ideal platform to learn advanced concepts in computing.

Even though the Raspberry Pi is inexpensive and credit card sized, it is still a sophisticated computer with a quad-core processor, a floating-point coprocessor, and a NEON parallel processing unit. What you learn about the Raspberry Pi is directly relevant to any device with an ARM processor, which includes nearly every cell phone and tablet. In fact, by volume, the ARM processor is the number one processor today.

In this book, we will cover how you program the Raspberry Pi at the lowest level; you will be operating as close to the hardware as possible. We will teach the format of the instructions, how to put them together into programs as well as details on the binary data formats they operate on. We will cover how to program the floating-point processor as well as the NEON parallel processor. We cover how to program the GPIO ports to interface to custom hardware, so you can experiment with electronics connected to your Raspberry Pi.

All you need is a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. This will provide all the tools you need to learn Assembly programming. This is the low cost of entry of running open source software like Raspbian Linux and the GNU Assembler. The last chapter covers 64-bit programming, where you will need to run Ubuntu MATE on your Pi.

This book contains many working programs that you can play with, use as a starting point, or study. The only way to learn programming is by doing; dont be afraid to experiment, as it is the only way you will learn.

Even if you dont use Assembly programming in your day-to-day life, knowing how the processor works at the Assembly level and knowing the low-level binary data structures will make you a better programmer in all other areas. Knowing how the processor works will let you write more efficient C code, and can even help you with your Python programming.

The book is designed to be followed in sequence, but there are chapters that can be skipped or skimmed, for instance, if you arent interested in interfacing to hardware, you can pass on Chapter , Floating-Point Operations if you will never do numerical computing.

I hope you enjoy your introduction to Assembly language. Learning it for one processor family will help you with any other processor architectures you encounter through your career.

No book is ever written in isolation. I want to especially thank my wife Cathalynn Labont-Smith for her support, encouragement, and expert editing.

I want to thank all the good folks at Apress who made the whole process easy and enjoyable. A special shout-out to Jessica Vakili, my coordinating editor, who kept the whole project moving quickly and smoothly. Thanks to Aaron Black, the senior editor, who recruited me and got the project started. Thanks to Stewart Watkiss, my technical reviewer, who helped make this a far better book. Thanks to James Markham, my development editor, for all his good work keeping me to standards.