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Learning assembly via Microcorruption

From time to time, I pull up the CS class homepages from Cal so I can brush up on stuff I learned/should have learned. It's kind of crazy to see what they're learning now, even in a lower division 3rd semester class (neural nets? MapReduce? Parallelism? We spent several lectures on Verilog and CPU design!). On a somewhat unrelated note -- why do CS professors/lecturers use Comic Sans in their PowerPoints?!

One specific reason I stalk these CS homepages is to read the lecture notes and materials on assembly. I've always had an irrational fear of assembly, ever since taking one of those CS classes and not doing so well... However, I always have to keep coming back to it for one reason or another -- usually by way of a CTF. After banging my head against the different problems from picoCTF (both 2013 and 2014) and slowly trying to figure out how to use gdb effectively, I finally understood how to get through the tutorial and level 1 of Microcorruption. This is both a sad and happy moment for me! Sad, because it's pathetic just how slow I learn. Happy, because I finally understood what was going on, and now I feel just that much more confident that I will learn assembly after all.

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