[stevek]

I agree, reading assembly is a great skill to have for some domains.

You'll almost never write assembly these days, except in the most niche of niches. A much more productive approach is to use intrinsics in a higher level language and examine the generated code. You don't even need to know every instruction. At this level you'll be looking out for sillyness such as register spills, hardware dependent badness (hello load-hit-stores)