The Art of 64-bit Assembly

You can ask an AI to explain how vtables work in x86. It will give you something that sounds right. What it won’t give you is what Windows actually expects the vtable to look like, why method dispatch behaves the way it does at the instruction level, or what breaks when you deviate from convention. This volume of The Art of 64-Bit Assembly closes the gap between a plausible explanation and genuine understanding.

Every chapter takes a construct you’ve used in C++, Python, or Rust, strips away the runtime, and rebuilds it from scratch in MASM, running under Windows. Objects, exceptions, closures, coroutines, concurrency: Each is dissected at the instruction level, with every decision made visible and explicit.

If you already know assembly and want to stop taking the hard parts on faith, this is the book.

Randall Hyde has spent decades writing assembly for medical devices, nuclear systems, and embedded hardware where correctness is not optional. He taught assembly language programming at the university level and is the author of The Art of Assembly Language , The Art of ARM Assembly , and the Write Great Code series, all from No Starch Press.

Chapter 1: Advanced Macros Chapter 2: Unicode Strings Chapter 3: Transcendental Functions Chapter 4: Advanced Procedures Chapter 5: Concurrent Programming Chapter 6: Object-Oriented Programming With MASM Chapter 7: Exception Handling Chapter 8: Thunks and Closures Chapter 9: Advanced Parameter Implementation Chapter 10: Iterators Chapter 11: Coroutines, Generators, and Fibers

Appendix A: ASCII Character Set Appendix B: Glossary Appendix C: Installing and Using Visual Studio