I just don't think my brain is equipped for this type of logic. Maybe it's true that people who are inclined toward certain skills or reasoning will be less inclined toward others. For instance: I'm good with grammar and creative writing, but I'm absolutely terrible at math. I can force myself to learn how some particular task is done, but then I could literally forget how it was done just a few minutes later. When it comes to writing, I very easily understand the patterns because they're based in words.

I long had the idea to write a ASM tutorial, without low level languages experience.
Maybe we can exchange some text and ideas. My advice right now is planning very well the tutorial.
Do the brainstorm of what topics are needed and their order (in a logical way, of course).
Then write some notes to remember to put examples, images, well commented source code examples, etc..
Finally write the topics, focusing on the first topics.

Quote from: Levak on April 24, 2010, 05:28:10 am

Well, I think it could be a very attractive idea.
I tried to learn ASM with a BIG french pdf tutorial (which I didn't finished yet) traduced from an english one. It was only for 8x86 ASM and was very well written.
Thus I'am interested in your contribution.
On the other hand, on which "architecture" will you be based to write this ASM tutorial ? z80/68k/ARM ?

ARM, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaze !

*is running away*

z80 actually, since pretty much all of Omnimaga are 83+/84+ users. I think we only have two 68k users and one is never active. For ARM, we have about 3 or 4 TI-Nspire coders, I think. It would be nice to see someone else write an ARM ASM tutorial written in a similar way as Hot_Dog tutorial. Hopefully, various types of tutorials can help more people. Those who find the alerady existing tutorials to be too hard can simply try other ones.

Example: this is not ASM but still related to tutorial difficulty: I couldn't understand some of the memory management commands in Axe Parser after reading the command list, and that lasted until I reread how they work in the documentation PDF. It was worded differently and put into some context, so I could understand more.

I think the hardest part of learning asm is the shift in paradigm.  In my opinion, someone with very little programming background will be able to learn the language and understand it better initially than someone who has exclusively programmed in higher level languages their whole lives.  I remember the concept of flags, registers, unsigned arithmetic, bit shifting, etc.  seemed so foreign to me when I was first learning.  You never cover that stuff in high level.  In my head I kept trying to make my code look and feel like the languages I was used to so then it would all be simple and I could just naturally pick it up.  But you can't do that, its impossible.  You miss all the concepts that are absolutely essential to do all the low level tasks which is the whole point.

You have to start with a very open mind.  Your knowledge of how to ride a bike isn't going to help you much when you're trying to fly a helicopter.  It took me about a whole summer to get the hang of it and it was almost a year before I could write a game with it.