neil, my advice would be to experiment with each opcode on your self-teaching led experiment. work the code over various ways and start to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of each opcode.

a lot of people don't spend the time doing that. i think you'll discover a lot more rewriting your routine various ways. some solutions are better for realtime speed, some for minimal register consumption and some for other reasons. if you ponder these as you explore, you'll be able to draw upon that bag of tricks that you accumulate and will be better prepared for future coding.

and besides... its a lot of fun!

stick with assembly language as long as you can. employers (what do they know anyway) will want C skills and you need that for hiring and resumes. my very unpopular opinion is that C makes programmers lazy and their implementations half-baked or half-reasoned. it might buy a porsche but it won't make you a real guru. hehehe

duh