Assembly(ASM) is the barebones language. Everything was programmed in ASM, if it wasn't then it was programmed in machine code which is binary numbers. Anyway, you need to know how to compute numbers in the binary and hexidecimal systems. Converting decimal numbers to binary and hex and vice versa is good. There are calculators online that will do this for you, but be careful, i've seen some online that didnt work right! You also need to know about the hardware of the computer. the processor has registers that hold data and set flags, but theres alot more. The PIC sets up interrupts, RAM and memory addressing, that stuff. Well I'm not gonna re-write all that stuff here, so check the links below to learn the basics. This page is about ASM code and programs for the Intel 80386/486 machines. Some stuff here will be valid for the older 80186/286, but the majority is all 32 bit.

You can program ASM with a simple text editor, but there are different compilers out there. If you have Win9x then you have the debug.exe program in windows\command This program will let you make and edit ASM programs. The output is a .com file There is:

Thats all the compilers i can think of, i suggest you should get one and the tutorial on it and some code to learn by and stick to that compiler but you should learn Debug first.

So what kinda stuff do you program in ASM? Well anything from drivers for any computer device such as a keyboard, USB, CD-ROM, etc to Windows applications. If you want to write your own OS ASM is the best choice. A lot of virus code is programmed in ASM, some of which I have here to download. You should know this, but I will tell you to save my ass. The virus code is NOT harmful. It's a text file with the code, if you compile and run the code on your system it will take effect!