The best way to understand how assembly language programming works is to learn one in detail, says Mahout (automatic control and hardware computing, Toulouse U., France). All assembly languages are short-lived, he says, because they die when the hardware they are written for is superseded, 20 years as the very longest. He dissects programming in the assembly language of a microcontroller constructed about an ARM Cortex-M3 core for three reasons: it is a 32-bit processor like almost all others, it is of recent conception and architecture, and it is adapted to the embedded world. His topics are the Cortex-M3 architecture and core, the proper use of assembly directives, operands of instruction, the instruction set, algorithmic and data structures, internal modularity, managing exceptions, and external modularity. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)