And, to follow that up; after you learn an assembly language, I would take a fresh look at C. It will help you see how see how different C idioms correspond to ways to do the same thing in assembly. And, after that, take another fresh look at Perl; it will similarly let you see how different dynamic Perl idioms correspond to some static C idioms. Doing something like that when I learned my first assembly language helped me to a deeper level of understanding, anyways. :)