Updating the Assembly Book

I've been updating my assembly textbook.  The biggest change is clearly the introduction of the ebe development environment.  It's a fairly crude IDE designed primarily for assembly.  It's either part of my effort to make learning assembly language easier or a fairly crude attempt to sell more books.  My opinion is that is clearly a bit of both.

I got pretty tired of trying to use gdb in class when I taught assembly language.  I felt that debugging was critical for assembly language and gdb was too much trouble.  I tried to make some changes to a handful of IDEs to support assembly language better and I did make some improvements, but it was still a bit of an unnatural mess to use.

Ebe is a godsend to assembly language.  It makes it much easier to use a debugger and I hope that translates into easier for people to learn to like assembly language.  It's the great grand-daddy language of them all and forms the cornerstone of rational debugging.

The problem is that I could include an enormous number of pictures captured from ebe in the book.  This would drive up the cost of the printed book.  On the other hand it makes the book more valuable and will increase sales - up to some point.  So there is a maximization problem.  I don't know the relationship of sales to number of pictures, so I can only guess.

The images would look better in color, but the book would lose me money at the current price.  There should be a charge difference based on the amount of color toner used, but the charge ignores the actual costs.  I diagram with red and blue lines in 500 pages would incur the same charge as full color photographs on each page.  That's crazy.  Maybe Create Space can cope with a wee bit of negotiation.  I doubt that having 50-100 half page or less diagrams with 5-10% filled dots would have much serious effect on printing cost.  It certainly wouldn't make much difference with a color laser printer and surely that is cheap enough.  Probably book format pages cost under $0.002 per page.  That's 2 tenths of a cent per page or  1 dollar for a 500 page book.  It really should be possible for Create Space to allow color textbooks to be printed on an actual cost (plus profit) basis.  This would increase their sales!