Get past the idea that you need to be advanced to grok assembly language. Assembly is in a lot of ways <i>easier</i> than a lot of higher-level languages. When I was growing up in the early 90s, a lot of my friends started on x86 assembly as a first language --- and x86 is the most annoying instruction set to learn.<p>The right way to learn this stuff is to dive in. You&#x27;ll be over your head for a few hours, but you&#x27;ll get your bearings. There are topics this technique doesn&#x27;t work great with, but assembly reversing isn&#x27;t one of them.<p>An additional benefit: assembly is one of those things that you might not use all the time in your career (although I&#x27;ve ended up using it quite a bit), but that will nonetheless illuminate lots of other things about computer science. There&#x27;s a reason Knuth used it as a language to express algorithms in TAOCP.<p>I can sum up the core idea of assembly for you in just a few sentences:<p>* You&#x27;re given 8-32 global variables of fixed size to work with, called &quot;registers&quot;.<p>* Virtually all computation is expressed in terms of simple operations on registers.<p>* Real programs need many more than 8-32 variables to work with.<p>* What doesn&#x27;t fit in registers lives in memory.<p>* Memory is accessed either with loads and stores at addresses, as if it were a big array, or through PUSH and POP operations on a stack.<p>* Memory is to an assembly program what the disk is to a Ruby program: you pull things out of memory into variables, do things with them, and eventually put them back into memory.<p>* Control flow is done via GOTOs --- jumps, branches, or calls.<p>* A jump is just an unconditional GOTO.<p>* Most operations on registers, like addition and subtraction, have the side effect of altering status flags, like &quot;the last value computed resulted in zero&quot;. There are just a few status flags, and they usually live in a special register.<p>* Branches are just GOTOs that are predicated on a status flag, like, &quot;GOTO this address only if the last arithmetic operation resulted in zero&quot;.<p>* A CALL is just an unconditional GOTO that pushes the next address on the stack, so a RET instruction can later pop it off and keep going where the CALL left off.<p>Everything else is just a detail.<p>When working with assembly, a lot of people will just get the programmer&#x27;s reference manual for the instruction set in a PDF (they&#x27;re published for free). Here&#x27;s a short one for X86:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ref.x86asm.net&#x2F;coder32.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ref.x86asm.net&#x2F;coder32.html</a><p>Here&#x27;s ARM:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infocenter.arm.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;topic&#x2F;com.arm.doc.qrc0001m&#x2F;QRC0001_UAL.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infocenter.arm.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;topic&#x2F;com.arm.doc.qrc0001m&#x2F;QR...</a><p>Here&#x27;s AVR:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atmel.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;atmel-0856-avr-instruction-set-manual.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atmel.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;atmel-0856-avr-instruction-set-m...</a><p>Even if you&#x27;d never written a line of assembly, if I asked you to express the procedures of a simple Ruby program in assembly and gave you the instruction set reference and those sentences, you would figure out how to get the job done in a couple hours. No monads or linear algebra required!