A non-traditonal approach to an assembly language course

Teaching assembly language is difficult at best. Most small schools and many larger ones use PC's in their labs. The method used by most texts focusing on the Intel 8x86 processor is becoming less and less applicable. This paper presents an approach to teaching an assembly language course that relies on free software, free documentation and integration with C or C++ programs. The software is available for Linux, UNIX and Windows and the methods are easily adaptable to these O/S. The course focuses on subroutines (functions) instead of programs. It also seeks to provide the students with a motivation for learning assembly language programming beyond writing device drivers. The concepts can easily be presented in a manner that readily relates to computer architecture and programming languages courses. All these factors appear to make the assembly language course more effective for the students and less painful for the instructor.