Both part of the Dr Watson series, these text deal with programming the 6502 microprocessor. As both machines have identical assemblers, as part of the Basic, the books are very similar with only the minimum of changes.

In fact I am prepared to believe that they are also very similar to the books for the Pet, Vic and CBM 64 and it is in this similarity that my main criticism is found.

Acorn machines have a very well-documented Operating System and you are advised, indeed forced if you want your program to run on all configurations, to use the facilities provided within the OS. These books have only one reference to the OS and are therefore almost useless in this respect. Further to this error they also insist on POKEing values to the screen in the early stages, and start off using decimal rather than hexadecimal values. This may seem a good idea to some but those battling with machine code are going to have to get used to hex so why not start that way? The tape contains useful but not remarkable utility programs.

D.C.