2.1. Pros and Cons

2.1.1. The advantages of Assembly

Assembly can express very low-level things:

2.1.2. The disadvantages of Assembly

Assembly is a very low-level language (the lowest above hand-coding the binary instruction patterns). This means

2.1.3. Assessment

All in all, you might find that though using assembly is sometimes needed, and might even be useful in a few cases where it is not, you'll want to:

Even when assembly is needed (e.g. OS development), you'll find that not so much of it is required, and that the above principles retain.

See the Linux kernel sources concerning this: as little assembly as needed, resulting in a fast, reliable, portable, maintainable OS. Even a successful game like DOOM was almost massively written in C, with a tiny part only being written in assembly for speed up.