Programming with Assembly or Hex.

[Jarulf]

Yup, I did some assembly throught my Uni course.  Writing assembly is easy, its reading assembly that's hard.  We had one project to find the five bugs in a piece of assembly code for a stopwatch, and it took us about five hours (one hour a week over five weeks).
All hats off to Jarulf!

I would say reading is a lot easier than writing. Or rather, writing GOOD code. One can always toss together something, but it usually end up not being so good. Reading, well, depends, there is a difference reading raw assembly, with no variables and such and reading assembler with all such things in. Then it is much more like reading other computer languages. The problem comes when you also have to figure out data structures and such.

As for assembler in it self, I think it might be of some use to understand it and being able to handle it, but working with pure assembler programming is mostly something not needed for most people today (unless you want to write compilers or something). Personally I learnt it back on the SPectrum and the Z80 processor (which is quite similar to the intel ones), I then moved to the intel processors of todays PCs when I was toying arround with my old "worm" game back in Turbo Pascal. I wanted to make the final program smaller and not bloated and took upon myself to rewrite all functions from the standard libraries in a more simpler form suuitable for waht I wanted. In addition I learend and used it for understanding things like interrups and basic BIOS functions, to program my all keyboard handler ("hijacking" the keyboard interupt) and timing functions and so on. Why? Because I wanted to and it was fun. On top of that I learnt a lot about how computers works down inside (at that time) and also improved my overall programming "skills", which I have a use for even now when I use mostly C for example.