No magic. No shortcuts. No runtime to blame.
You can ask an AI to explain how vtables work in x86. It will give you something that sounds right. What it won’t give you is what Windows actually expects the vtable to look like, why method dispatch behaves the way it does at the instruction level, or what breaks when you deviate from convention. This volume of The Art of 64-Bit Assembly closes the gap between a plausible explanation and genuine understanding.
Every chapter takes a construct you’ve used in C++, Python, or Rust, strips away the runtime, and rebuilds it from scratch in MASM, running under Windows. Objects, exceptions, closures, coroutines, concurrency: Each is dissected at the instruction level, with every decision made visible and explicit.
What you’ll build:
- Object-oriented programs in MASM: vtables, method dispatch, and inheritance, from scratch by hand
- Windows structured exception handling (SEH) installed and managed at the instruction level
- Thunks, closures, and iterators that behave like higher-order functions
- Coroutines, generators, and fibers without resorting to HLL code
- Concurrent programs with real synchronization primitives, directly from assembly
- Unicode string handling done correctly, at the level where most code gets it wrong
- Domain-specific macro languages inside MASM, built from first principles
If you already know assembly and want to stop taking the hard parts on faith, this is the book.
