Reviews for 6502 machine & assembly language programming

The average rating for 6502 machine & assembly language programming based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-17 00:00:00 Dale Lofton Huh... there's mostly positive reviews for this book here on goodreads. But boy, I'm glad I didn't try to learn from it back in the day. The first 155 pages are a review of 6502 machine language. Usually, an ML book allows concepts to gradually build, but instead, the authors introduce the instructions around common aspects, like a grocery store that decides to put the cinnamon, maple syrup, and avocados next to each other because they all happen to come from trees. The book spends a lot of time on array/table lookups. When moving an index pointer across records on the 6502, it's all about creating/maintaining the 16-bit base, then doing the tiny amount of varying indexing that the 8-bit registers allow before adjusting the base again. But not once does the book mention self-modifying code, which is frequently the go-to indexing approach in many trade-off spaces. None of their examples are assuming ROM code that would preclude such an approach. Anyway, the book might have been useful for suggestions on how to design multi-precision math operations back in '82, but I don't think it's a "must have" for today's retro programmer.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-28 00:00:00 Sean Poole An outstanding piece of work, the next best thing to having the author come and train you in person. I like technical books to have a lot of details, to be well organized, and to be clearly written and illustrated, and this one meets all of those criteria. Like the author's work on building a PC, this is the best I've seen yet on the topic in the more than 20 years I've been fiddling with computers.