Question: I am on a Mac with Snow Leopard (10.6.3). I hear that the assembly language I work with has to be valid with the chipset that you use. I am completely new to this I have a basic background in C and Objective-C programming and an almost strong background in PHP. I have always wanted to see what assembly is all about. 

The tutorial I'll be looking at is by VTC [[link]](http://www.vtc.com/products/Assembly-Language-Programming-Tutorials.htm).

What I want to know is: are the tutorials that I'm about to do compatible with the assembly version on the Mac that I have?

I am completely new to this language although I do recall studying some of it way, way back in the day. I do have Xcode and what I'm wondering is what kind of document would I open in Xcode to work with assembly and does the Mac have a built in hex editor (when it comes time to needing it)?

Answer: 
A good way to pick up assembly is to get yourself an embedded device to play with.

TI has some [nice, inexpensive devkits](http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuprodmsptoolsw.tsp?sectionId=95&tabId=1203&familyId=342&toolTypeId=1) to play with. I've poked around with the Chronos kit ($50) which has digital watch with a programmable MSP430 microcontroller with a wireless link to your computer. It's pretty sweet. 

**Update:** I forgot to mention the [Arduino](http://www.arduino.cc/). It's a pretty nifty open platform with tons of interesting peripherals and projects online.
An assembly language is instruction architecture specific. Chips are an instantiation of an instruction architecture. 

In my opinion, you are best served by getting TextWrangler and directly compiling with gcc.

The file extension you are looking for is `.s`.