Your Apple II may not, in fact need you, despite this book's title, but that's one of its few oversights. It's organised into 30 projects which range from pretty complex to fairly trivial, but even the less impressive ones can be used as sub-sections of the more advanced material.

I particularly liked Wattenberg's careful balance between light and heavy. In one section, for example, he develops some handy calculus routines and then applies them to a lunar-lander game to upgrade the Acceleration and Gravity functions.

Another major project is a mini text-editor, which makes the Enigma-type encryption-decryption routine described later into a very complete coding system. Actually, this editor is not so mini, and being well structured and clearly explained, would be quite easy to extend. Even adding a global search-and-replace wouldn't be impossible.

An interesting decision, and one on which I have mixed opinions, was to gather the program texts themselves into a separate appendix, referring in the chapters to the line numbers when discussing a particular point. This has the benefit of not interrupting the reader's flow with slabs of printout and ensures that crucial lines of code aren't broken at misleading points, but it does involve a lot of page-flipping.

Overall, however, a useful and informative guide to writing quality programs.

Richard King