An Introduction to Assembly Programming with RISC-V

This book focuses on teaching the art of programming in assembly language, using the RISC-V ISA as the guiding example. Towards this goal, the text spans, at an introductory level, the organization of computing systems, describes the mechanics of how programs are created and introduces basic programming concepts including both user level and system programming. The ability to read and write code in low-level assembly language is a powerful skill to be able to create high performance programs, and to access features of the machine that are not easily accessible from high-level languages such as C, Java or Python, for example to control peripheral devices. The book introduces the organization of computing systems, and the mechanics of creating programs and converting them to machine-readable format suitable for execution. It also teaches the components of a program, or how a programmer communicates her intent to the system via directives, data allocation primitives and finally the ISA instructions, and their use. Basic programming concepts of control flow, loops as well as the runtime stack are introduced. Next the book describes the organization of code sequences into routines and subroutines, to compose a program. The text also addresses issues related to system programming, including notions of peripheral control and interrupts. This text, and ancillary teaching materials, has been used in introductory classes at the University of Campinas, Brazil (UNICAMP) and has undergone refinement and improvement for several editions.