[tptacek]

My favorite C book is "C Interfaces and Implementations" (CII) by Hanson. It's an excellent bridge from Perl/Python to C; in particular, it gives you resizeable arrays and hash tables, which are the two things you will miss most from high level languages. My advice is, learn to code C for a couple months using CII, then tackle assembly. When you see how C programs are decomposed into functions, and how arguments are passed to functions, you'll understand much more about how assembly should work as well.

I've taught a couple people basic x86 assembly using a programmable assembler we wrote in Ruby. A really great place to start with assembly is to be able to define a array of instructions and be able to "jump in" to them and see what they do.

[hilarious]

CII looks like it'll be an amazing book! Shame it's not available online, I wish it were, I wouldn't sleep tonight!

I'll probably make a purchase when I get my paycheck though, thanks!