Just as a comment on the books that were suggested on the list yesterday;
    they're all out of print.  I was kinda amazed by that, but you can't find
    one of any of them new in a bookstore.

People don't program PCs in assembly any more.  The last time it was a
reasonable thing to do was probably slightly before the 286 machines came
out, and now it's close to laughable.  What is the average program these
days, anyway?  10% new code and 90% windows libraries and system calls?

There's still call to program xxx86s in assembly language, of course,
for really small or really fast applications, but not on PCs.  PC
programmers (or would-be PC programmers) are where the book sales are -
there's plenty of books on Java and Visual Basic...

I didn't have much trouble picking up the 8086 assembler from Intel's
manuals, WAY back when - the instruction set description assumed an
implied (strongly typed!) assembler syntax, and they were nicely grouped
in catagories.  Of course, it was something like my 6th processor to
program in assembly, and Intel may have followed MicroSoft into the
depths of awful manuals.

The MIT (?) freeware unix cross-assembler is probably still available,
although it doesn't use the Intel syntax.

68000 based Macintoshes are pretty cheap (used) these days if you want
to try your hand at 68k assembler.

BillW