Course Review for Midterm

• Bits, hex, bytes.  What bitwise operators do.  How many bits & bytes in a byte, word, dword, qword.
• Machine code: concept of bytes representing instructions.  (exact bytes used for x86 are not important for the test)
  
• Registers: rax, eax, ax, etc.  Saved/preserved vs temporary/scratch registers.
• Arithmetic: how to use "add", "sub", "imul", and the bitwise instructions.  Overflow.
  
• Pointers: how to allocate space on the stack, the heap (with malloc), or statically (with section .data); how to access memory with DWORD[ptr] or QWORD[ptr].  Pointer arithmetic for arrays, classes, and the stack.
  
• Stack: how to allocate space, what functions expect, how to save & restore registers, how to clean up stack.  How "push" and "pop" instructions work.
  
• Branches: how to convert "if", "for", "while", etc into assembly. 
  
• Functions: How "call" and "ret" instructions work.  "extern" and "global" declarations.  How parameters go in, and come out.
  

• Writing long pieces of assembly code.  However, short segments (2-3 lines) are extremely likely.
• Large amounts of hand arithmetic.  Short or simple arithmetic and bitwise operations are likely.