Can't agree with folks who think it's not useful to understand Assembly, though. It's important to understand how things work at that level, if for no other reason than to be able to diagnose some class of problems that you'll run into even when developing using high level languages.

2 hours ago, TLapworth93 wrote

is it possible to learn Machine code, Binary code, things like this. My tutor said its almost impossible....but surely since it exists someone some were down the line wrote it?

Your tutor is wrong. It's not hard to learn, but it only has very niche applications, such as developing custom hardware, key kernel components, compilers or some weird low-level security testing.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/search.html?keyword=instruction+set+manual

There are many assemblers for x86/AMD64, here is one example often used for learning (free/multiplatform) called FASM:

http://flatassembler.net/

You can even write your own if you want a challenge.

But if you're just interested in playing with assembler, create a C project (in visual studio) and do this:

__declspec(naked) foo()
{
  __asm 
  {
    int 3
    mov eax, 0xaabbccdd
    ret
  }
}

void main()
{
  int result = foo();
  printf("%08x\r\n", result);
}

"int 3" gives you a manually inserted breakpoint so you can step through the function.

You can also right click the program at any breakpoint when you're running C or C++ code and click "view disassembly" to show the output of the compiler. You'll notice there that the code is much less understandable but also much shorter when running release builds.

Finally you can right click in the disassmbly window to "Show Code Bytes", which will show you the actual opcodes that are being sent to the processor.

BYTE[] data= { 0xcc, 0x33, 0xc0, 0x40, 0xc3 };

void main()
{
  FARPROC fp = (FARPROC)&data[0];
  DWORD _ignore;
  VirtualProtect(fp, sizeof(data), PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE, &_ignore);
  printf("%08x", fp());
}

6 hours ago, TLapworth93 wrote

damn, it all looks pretty complicated. im studying to someday go into PLC programming. industrial automation as i am being taught by a company that makes these machines. im learning C sharp but was just wondering about the machine code (or assembly language). i think i might give it a try in the near future. thanks

most of the time you will read and write the assembly language code for a given cpu not the binary machine code, think of assembler as the "source Code" for the machine.

when you have to fix a bug in the code you will often use a tool that may be called a debugger or a monitor that can read a block of memory and display the assembly code that it in that block so that you can understand it more rapidly.  in time you will start to see how the two are related

most of them will show hex values on the left and then the assembly on the right so that you can learn them both.

but often you may also have a C compiler that has been optimized to generate code for a given cpu that let's you spend say 95 to 99% of the time working in C code.

C can often be translated by a good compiler to very clean tight machine code.

what you should do first is get really good at converting between number systems, decimal, octal, hexadecimal and binary as that skill will help you learn to read the memory dumps that have the machine code sections.