Ack... nothing against johnnyb or his new book - and not to start another flamewar like the great man vs info cataclysm of 2003 - but I get the shudders thinking of x86 assembly being used as a first contact to machine language. I have never come across anything so baroque as the Intel instruction set... it's a shame that its pointlessly painful perversities are now by default a rite of passage for student programmers... There are many more fun machines to learn about :-)
But I'm not the first to say it... I'll let the always erudite /. crowd speak:
Calling X86 assembly "baroque" is like calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch".(From a thread reviewing a different book on x86 assembly.)