Beej was there for me when I was a poor boy living in a 3rd world country with no Richard Stevens on any shelf. Along with Beej, I also thoroughly devoured NeHe's tutorials, the DOS assembly programming manual "Help PC", Ralph Brown's Interrupt list, Jack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler", and many many of the early Free programming texts in the web along with the "free" ones that were floating around in the various underground "scenes" ;-)
Just to add. If anybody remembers a phile by the name "masm32.doc" which was an assembly programming tutorial for 32bit Windows. It came out right around the time Windows 95 was released, and us assembly hackers didn't have a 32bit assembler. This document showed you how you could encode 32bit instructions as inline byte definitions (db in masm/tasm.)
I had this document, the Trumpet Winsock manual, and a b-grade text on BSD sockets programming. I was foolish enough to have written socket code in assembly for a platform I have never programed for before, with an assembler that didn't support the opcodes I was typing in. This is all hard to imagine, FUCK, but I was 17, and I had a heart.
(considered a fool cuz I dropped outta high school, stereo type of another blackhat misunderstood, and it's still all good.)
