MIPS Assembly/Introduction

This page is going to serve as a general foreword about this book.

What This Book is About

This book is going to discuss the MIPS assembly language. This book will cover not only the straightforward facet of this subject (how to program MIPS), but will also look deeper, and discuss MIPS from a very low level. In this way, this book should be useful both for people just learning to program MIPS, and also to people who are looking to do advanced tasks in MIPS (such as write a MIPS assembler program, or construct a low-level OS kernel in MIPS). This book will not talk about the specifics of MIPS hardware, however.

Who This Book is For

This book is designed to be a reference for all people who are interested in MIPS. This book starts off with the basics behind the language, and discusses the various operations in such a manner that beginners will be able to get a handle of MIPS programming. However, this book also contains a number of advanced sections for experienced programmers who are looking at doing advanced projects with the MIPS architecture.

How This Book is Organized

This book is organized in such a fashion that the most simple material is presented first, and the most advanced material is saved towards the end. The first section of the book is reserved for historical and interesting information about MIPS, and listings of real-world MIPS implementations. The second section is going to go into the MIPS assembly language, talking about each instruction individually, and explaining how to use them. The third section is going to talk about the topics of programming, assembling, and emulating MIPS code. Finally, the fourth section is going to talk about advanced topics, such as the internal machine code of MIPS machines, the nature of pseudoinstructions, some advanced system instructions, and handling exceptions.

Where to Go From Here

This book will serve as a complete reference to programming MIPS. While there are no Wikimedia resources specifically designed to follow this text, the reader may benefit from reading about higher-level languages, or assemblers, or another advanced programming topic.

For more information about how to design MIPS and other types of microprocessor systems, see Microprocessor Design.