The body and the lens Book

I got this book many years ago when an Atari 8-bit was my only computer. I read through it last year, since I've been revisiting the Atari as a challenge I've set for myself. I'm using it as an entree into the practice of reworking a system in a deep way. One avenue I thought I might use for that was 6502 assembler.

This book was a nice introduction to assembler on the Atari, though it's by no means complete. I ended up finding a more complete Atari Assembler reference online from an old Atari users group newsletter.

This book gets you familiar with the basics, understanding memory, what some of the terms for that mean (like MEMLO, and MEMHI, low byte and high byte, etc.). It goes through examples of how to use a basic list of operators that a 6502 programmer will need to know how to use. It has some nice touches, like teaching how to do 16-bit arithmetic operations, and how to use the Atari's sound hardware. If you want to do anything more than "hello world"-type programming, though, you will need more than this book.