Hello Brian,

If your book is pure MASM, you might be interested in the free alternative 
NASM, or the Net-wide Assembler. It has very similar syntax to the MASM 
examples; of course anything Windows/DOS-Centric won't work but the 
examples themselves will if you adapt them. It is a VERY nice little 
assembler and a godsend for those of us that got our start on MASM and are 
familiar with MASM syntax.

NetBSD has a nice pkgsrc entry for nasm and it works pretty much "out of 
the box". For information about how to write your first hello-world, I've 
written some (possibly out of date) tutorials that are completely 
over-done. All I needed to do was link my normal code with crtbegin and 
crtend. :)

Here're the URLs, they're all NASM-specific:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Pain
http://www.sudog.com/index2.php?mode=archives-detail&ID=998433769

Chapter 2: A Trip Through ELFen Hell
Subtitle: How I learned I went through way more pain than necessary
http://www.sudog.com/index2.php?mode=archives-detail&ID=999510663

Good luck! Assembly can be vastly rewarding in a UNIX-style environment!

ttyl,
-sudog

On Tuesday 29 January 2002 06:50, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> Can anyone make any suggestions for getting acquainted with the
> GNU Binutils GAS?  I recently checked out a book on 80x86 assembly from
> the engineering library here at Pitt[.edu], but of course, all the
> examples use some useless Microsoft 'macro assembler', and of course, the
> cd-rom is missing from the back.  Besides, I'd prefer not to have to
> re-lean everything the GNU AS way at a later date, but I have a feeling
> the chances of me finding an "Introduction to Assembly" text that uses 
GNU
> AS are slim and none >:}