Welcome to life in the computer fast lane—programming with assembly language. Programs written with assembly language have the execution speed required to create lively graphics and sounds in games and educational software. Precision measurement, control, and communications applications also require the speed provided by assembly language programming.

In writing this book, we assumed that you have a beginning knowledge of the BASIC programming language. You do not have to be an expert, but it will help you to learn assembly language if you can write programs in either BASIC or some other high-level language. Most programmers do not begin their program ming career by learning assembly language: they begin with a high-level language such as BASIC, FORTRAN, or Pascal. Once you learn assembly language, you will have the best of both worlds: the speed provided by assembly
language and the computational ease of BASIC.