The Zen of Assembly Language assumes that you're already familiar with assembly language. Not an expert, but at least acquainted with the registers and instructions of the 8088, and with the use of one of the popular PC assemblers. Your familiarity with assembly language will allow us to skip over the droning tutorials about the use of the assembler and the endless explanations of binary arithmetic that take up hundreds of pages in introductory books. We're going to jump into high-performance programming right from the start, and when we come up for air 16 chapters from now, your view of assembly language will be forever altered for the better. Then we'll leap right back into Volume II, applying our newfound knowledge of assembly language to ever- more-sophisticated programming tasks. In short, The Zen of Assembler is about nothing less than how to become the best assembly-language programmer you can be.