This is my Bible.

I really want to find that book, I am only wondering how much will it cost. It is a precious bible for me. I have only the PDF version of it now, enough to study, but I must have teh brick! :)

My curiosity was caught by the chapters about pure asm optimizing at old (anymore) PC architectures, from the 8088 to the 286/386, 486 and the Pentium. I was really searching for something like that around, it was my child dream optimizing asm code and counting every cycle, but it seems that it's complex on the PC and I could hardly find some docs about it. It's really what I need because Michael Abrash seems to be a performance freak and knows what I ask for :)

And then, you get a lot of chapters in advance, about interesting VGA/Mode-X tricks that I never managed to try (regurarly used by older DOS democoders), plus some chapters about the 3d techniques and optimizations behind Quake, plus a lot of additional stuff.

It's everything I need, getting deep inside the philosophy of optimizing, X86 architectures from 8088 to the Pentium, explaining a lot of hardware VGA tricks, 3D algorithms and optimizations.

Perhaps this book is not as usefull for some programmers, since most people have moved already in C++ and DirectX/OpenGL, but definitelly it's a must if you think optimizing of older PCs in assembly as a sport. It was a child dream of mine, perhaps PCs got so old before I started coding, but I think I will still manage to read some more chapters and try something on my old boxes.

I also like Michael's humoristic stories and way of writting a lot!

Other Reviews

• Graphics Programming Black Book and the mindset of programming for performance
• It was an excellent book but it is getting a little bit old
• This is my Bible.
• accessible book -- out of print but not rare