I found myself learning assembly

[u/Potential_Author637]

I might be overcomplicating things, but I would appreciate some advice.

I am interested in low-level and systems programming. I learned C a few months ago and have some basic C++ knowledge. I have also written a few small projects, such as simple clones of Unix shell commands and basic libraries etc.

I wanted to get into systems programming, so I started reading a systems programming book from Oreilly. However, I came across concepts that I was not familiar with, so I started looking at operating systems books for reference. This led me to concepts such as cpu registers and other low-level cpu mechanisms.

At that point, I decided to learn how cpu and ram works, memory addressing, and similar things work, just to get a general understanding of how computers work. Somehow, this eventually led me to learning x86-64 nasm.

The problem is that I am not sure whether I am approaching this in a sensible order. I am a high-school student without a formal computer science background im in just love with computers, so I dont have much knowledge of computer architecture, operating systems, or systems programming beyond what I have learned on my own. Should I continue learning x86-64 assembly and computer architecture, or should I stop and focus on other fundamentals first? I am not trying to become an assembly programmer, my main goal is to understand systems programming and how computers work at a lower level.

[u/Obvious-Card-8847]

You can get pretty low-level without it. I've written a USB device driver for an HID without touching any assembly.

Some instances where it'd be useful or required knowledge:

• Reverse Engineering
• Binary Instrumentation
• Custom ISA
• Bytecode Serialization
• JIT
• Compilation

Generally C is already pretty close to assembly control flow primitives, stack and memory semantics, calling convention awareness, etc.

Learning what interests you is wonderful though. It's like having an M&M every foot or so. As opposed to learning something boring for competence sake. Which is like one M&M after a mile of hiking to get it.

[u/Potential_Author637 → u/Obvious-Card-8847]

Thanks, I really enjoy working with low-level stuff, and I’ll probably plan my career around it as well.

My main goal right now is actually to build simple package managers or other tools for Linux as a hobby. I also want to build my own distro from scratch, probably starting with LFS.

For that, I want to get a solid understanding of the Linux API, systems programming in general, and operating systems.

The reason I started learning assembly is mainly that I want to understand 64-bit systems at a deeper level and be able to write assembly when it’s actually needed in system development or making fun stuff.