We are slowly approaching the point where we will be able to begin to actually deal with Assembly language itself--writing code, examining programs, solving problems. We are just one step away, and the step is setting up a development environment for Assembly programming.

Despite the fact that the assembler used in this book is a Flat Assembler (FASM), it is important to cover at least two other options and, therefore, in this chapter, you will learn how to configure three types of development environment:

• Setting up a development environment for Windows-based applications using Visual Studio 2017 Community: This will allow the direct integration of Assembly projects with existing solutions
• Installing GNU Compilers Collection (GCC): Although it is possible to use GCC on both Windows and *nix platforms, we will emphasize GCC usage on Linux
• Flat Assembler: This one seems to be the simplest and most comfortable one to use for Assembly programming on either Windows or Linux

We will end each section with a short test program written in the Assembly language specifically for the assembler described in the section.