RISC-V Assembly Language

This author really cares about his subject. Excellent for learning.

EDIT:The software package is easily obtained by following the instructions in the preface, page iii.Other than that, it is a good intro into the opcodes, the registers, and assembly language. It is a bit thin, but worth the money.I may edit this again.

This book is great for the novice to the seasoned rf engineer. Risc-V is an upcoming force in microcontroller architecture. Llearning about how the assembly language fulfills the niche in programming languages that are closer to the metal than 3 GL or 4GL languages is important. The author guides the reader in a fun, thoughtful, and erudite manner that can easily be understood. As a fellow software/hardware engineer, I can appreciate the trail the author is blazing.Totally worth getting. Good reference fordebugging “C” disassembled code. I highly recommend this book.

As far as assembly language textbooks are concerned, this is one of the best I've ever read. Most of them teach you how to program in assembly language, but you don't learn much about the machine or system programming. But this one, as the author says, emphasizes system concepts so you'll learn more than just how to write RISC-V assembly language programs. For example, you'll learn why the instruction formats are as they are, learn how the assembler works, how the linker works, what's inside an object module, and the essential features of RISC-V architecture. There are some excellent references on RISC-V (for example, the Patterson/Waterman book), but they assume a lot of prior knowledge of computer architecture. And all the really introductory material I've seen on RISC-V is superficial. So thisbook nicely fills the gap. Last but not least, the software is great. No setup required. Just unzip the file and you can start writing and running assembly code right away.

This is exactly the book you want if you are learning riscv assembly. This book is good for beginners and people who have done other assembly programming

It seems that this book was aimed at beginner, people who program near the metal can skip entire chapters.

Easy to use book and software.

Granted that there aren't many books written on RISC-V. The book is pretty thin to begin with. But when you remove all of the stuff on basic things like number representation and the theory about how stacks, tool chains etc. work, the book is very thin indeed. It is the free software that arguably makes it worth the price. Some of the exercises are extremely trivial. I was hoping for a more comprehensive look at all of the encodings, not just a few. I'm glad that the compiler is C and not C++ or some other language.

Book has good quality

This is a very good book for anybody who wants to learn about the RISC-V ISA and has no previous experience with it or another ISA in general.

Despite all the hype about RISC-V, two things have been missing: Actual hardware and a good introduction to assembly programming. With this book, Dos Reis takes care of the second problem with a no-nonsense textbook that starts with basic binary numbers and ends with how C is compiled to assembler. The author also provides a software package for assembling, linking, and running RISC-V programs that is currently by far the easiest way to get actual hands-on experience with coding RISC-V assembler.There are few things you should be aware of before buying this book. First, there is no fluff in the text, nothing about the history and goals of the RISC-V project or why learning any of this might be good idea. The book immediately gets down to business and continues apace. If you are used to the more chatty style of (say) an O'Reilly book, this will take getting some used to. However, this is also the reason why about 140 pages are enough.Second, Dos Reis starts from a very low-level. For instance, he spends quite some time with the bit fields of the various instructions and how these are generated, and the pseudo-instructions are introduced rather late. If you just want to program assembler, this might be annoying. However, if you are interested in creating any sort of hardware or emulator for the RISC-V, this is great, and in my case it led to a deeper understanding of how things work under the hood.Third, the software package offered seems to be closed source (at least I haven't been able to find a source in the package or online). Asking the users to simply trust you seems charmingly archaic in the days of bitcoin miners and spy malware, and I'm not sure if this is the right decision. Having said that, the software itself is an absolute joy to work with while learning how to code. The RISC-V foundation should have brought out something like this themselves a long time ago.Fourth, the book only covers the RV32I and RV32M instruction sets. What is missing is the compressed instruction set RV32C which seems to lead to higher code density. If I have any wish for the next edition, this would be it.In this the first edition, there are some typos throughout the book, and users will want to consult the erratum included with the software package.However, I have no problem at all giving this book and the software full five stars. It provides an excellent learning experience and fills a big gap in the wider RISC-V ecosystem. If you are interested in writing your own RISC-V assembler code, start here.

It's super clear, straight, well explained in detail. I'm a web dev, but this is super fun to have as a side project.

Ich arbeite gerade an einem Schachprogramm in Assembler für den 8-Bit Atmel-AVR. Ich wollte schauen wie einfach/kompliziert die Portierung auf einen RISC-V ist. Ich bin auf das Buch wegen des Angekündigten RISC-V Simulators aufmerksam geworden.Dieser ist jedoch ein schlechter Scherz. Es gibt nur das exe-File und keinen Kode. Er hat auch massive Beschränkungen. Z.B. darf ein Programm nur 64KB gross sein. Beim AVR wäre das logisch, beim RISC-V gibt es keinen Grund dafür.Das Buch ist von vornherein nicht sehr dick. De facto ist es noch viel dünner. Der Autor füllt die Seiten mit vielen Trivialitäten bzw. Sachen die mit dem RISC-V nix zu tun haben. Z.B. wie stellt man negative Zahlen dar. Es ist offensichtlich sehr viel Wiederverwertung von anderen Büchern dabei.Wesentlich besser ist David Patterson, Andrew Waterman: The RISC-V Reader. Dort wurde meine Frage beantwortet: Es sollte relativ trivial sein ein AVR-Programm auf den RISC-V zu portieren. Der kompliziertere Teil ist die Anpassung der IO an ein anderes Entwicklungsboard.