I knew from the title it was going to be Michael Abrash's book. There is, indeed, a lot of wisdom there. I did most of my recreational x86 assembler coding in 1993-95. I got the book when it came out (an unwieldy tome in paper form) and poured over it but, sadly, I never really did much x86 assembler after that.
There's a lot in the book that's dated, being very VGA-specific, or specific to the x86 CPUs of that day. Even so, there are lots of ideas in the book that transcend that. His advice about optimization, and about how to approach problems, is timeless.
His Zen of Assembly language from 1990 was also great. It's actually Volume 1 but he never did a Volume 2 because it would have been not very relevant by then. Not useful per se but there's a lot of fascinating stuff related to the x86 processors of the era.
Even so, there are lots of ideas in the book that transcend that. His advice about optimization, and about how to approach problems, is timeless.
I convinced my parents to buy this book for me as a gift when I was in high school. It taught me enough about x86 assembly language to reverse engineer the Windows driver for an HDTV tuner card to start writing a Linux driver, and the book still influences my views on performance and profiling.
I think the best thing to take from the book is to measure your code with a timer...
The specific parts probably can’t apply these days because systems are so complex (multi-core, multi-threaded, multi-processing) that you can never assume your assembly timing will be any way accurate.
There's a lot in the book that's dated, being very VGA-specific, or specific to the x86 CPUs of that day. Even so, there are lots of ideas in the book that transcend that. His advice about optimization, and about how to approach problems, is timeless.