!pr0

A couple of people have pointed out to me that we have advertised Don Lancaster's "Micro Cookbook, Volume II", but have never described it.  This one is subtitled Machine Language Programming, and picks up where Volume I left off.  He devotes about 450 pages to machine language programming, simple I/O ports, and his Micro Applications Attack method of problem-solving.

Lancaster's method of teaching machine language looks a little strange from my perspective:  he says don't even think about an assembler until you have thoroughly learned the instructions from hand assembly.  He lays out a system of learning all the instructions and addressing modes by documenting them on 3X5 cards.  All his examples refer to the 6502, but the system can be applied to any processor.  I suppose this IS a great way to engrave into your memory exactly how a processor works.  All this is handled in Don's usual entertaining and enlightening fashion.

This is a good place to mention another book of Lancaster's that has been around for a while:  The Hexadecimal Chronicles.  This is a huge collection of conversion tables for moving around between ASCII, decimal, hexadecimal and octal (including Apple's negative decimal way of handling addresses.)  My TI Programmer calculator is a lot smaller and easier to use, but much more expensive too.  If you can find a copy of this book, look it over carefully.  It may be exactly what you need.
