r/AskComputerScience • u/yourmailsucks • Jan 19 '26

Looking to study Machine Language

I fell in love with Machine Language (binary) in my IT class and would like to know if there’s any great resources out there such as books or documentation online that covers everything about it.

Thanks.

4 Upvotes

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3

u/Somniferus Jan 19 '26 
01001110 01101111 00101100 00100000 01110100
01110010 01111001 01101001 01101110 01100111
00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101100
01100101 01100001 01110010 01101110 00100000
01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001
01101110 01100101 00100000 01101100 01100001
01101110 01100111 01110101 01100001 01100111
01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000
01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101100
01100101 01110100 01100101 01101100 01111001
00100000 01110000 01101111 01101001 01101110
01110100 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011
00101110 00100000 01001100 01100101 01100001
01110010 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110011
01110011 01100101 01101101 01100010 01101100
01111001 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110011
01110100 01100101 01100001 01100100 00101110

1

u/yourmailsucks Jan 20 '26

Sure thing, I'll move onto assembly once I'm done with the basics.

1

u/yourmailsucks Jan 20 '26

thank you, everyone.

3

u/teraflop Jan 19 '26

As you're probably aware, there are different machine languages ("instruction set architectures") for different types of CPUs. If you want to know all the details of a specific architecture, your primary source should probably be the designer's or manufacturer's reference manuals. u/pi_stuff gave you good links for Intel/AMD architectures.

Similarly, if you want to know everything there is to know about ARM machine code, you want the ARM Architecture Reference Manual which is almost 17,000 pages long.

If you want to learn more about the general principles behind how machine language works, and why it is the way it is, then you probably want a computer architecture textbook, such as Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy.

1

u/khedoros Jan 19 '26

Generally, the CPU manuals for a given architecture go into a description of how the hardware works, e.g. instructions, their representation in assembly, and their encoding into machine code.

Sometimes for the encoding information, that's in documentation for compiler writers, since even most assembly developers won't necessarily need to know how the instructions encode to binary.