Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ingr!crooks
From: crooks@ingr.com (Steve Crooks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: assembly language books
Message-ID: <3413@ingr.com>
Date: 9 Jan 89 20:13:32 GMT
Organization: Intergraph Corp. Huntsville, Al
Lines: 86

Here are the results of my call for opinions on Amiga assembly language
books.  I received 7 responses.

There are three books available, all with approximately the same name
(I can't remember them specifically :-).  The publishers are Tab, Abacus, and
Compute.

The responders rated them approximately thusly:

		trash	not very good	ok	great
Tab		1			4
Abacus		2	1		1
Compute					2	1

The various comments given (paraphrased to save some room):

	I recommend both the Abacus & Tab books because they cover different
	aspects for programming assembly on the Amiga.

	Keep away from the Abacus book!  It flys through the instruction set.
	Almost every single example goes straight to the hardware.  The
	English translation is 100% broken, hard to read English.  The only
	thing I liked about it was it's appendix, which has all the
	Library Vector Offsets and their register usage in one spot.

	The Abacus book is somewhat specific, in that it uses the Assempro
	assembler as a base from which to explain things and give examples.
	The Tab book falls down somewhat in the examples area.  The Compute
	book is pretty good, and will get the novice going.

	I would say the Tab book is a qualified ``good''.  There are gaps and
	errors.  If your first assembler language was Z80, you will have no
	trouble understanding it.  If you cut your teeth on another
	assembler, this may not be the book for you.

	The Compute book is complete and has examples.

	The Tab book professes to be a book that a novice can learn from.
	Don't you believe it.  It's just reference material, probably
	straight from Motorola and the RKM.  It has only three programming
	examples.  I read over half the book, and I feel that I still don't
	know the first thing about assembly language.

	The Tab book is probably good for people unfamiliar to assembly
	programming in general, and is too "easy" for the rest.  A friend
	of mine is quite satisfied with the Compute book.  The Abacus book
	should be avoided. The Abacus book's appendix is nice, but isn't
	worth the price of the book.  I would recommend the Compute book.

You can draw your own conclusions from this.

Two people recommended the book _680x0_Programming_by_Example_ published by
Sams.  They both heartily recommended it.

One person recommended _The_Kickstart_Guide_To_The_Amiga_ as a good book
for those who have only previous experience with 8-bit computers.

Conclusion
----------

While I was collecting and reading these opinions, my wife, a real
sweetie, went out and bought me the Compute book.  I'm happy with it. 
One thing I would have preferred is if they had assumed you had the
standard Amiga includes and startup.  I understand why they didn't do
it, I just would have preferred it.  They have you create all the
startup and include files that are necessary to use the programs in the
book, explaining them in the process.  A disk can be ordered with
everything already on it (including an assembler) to save some typing
time.  I have the include file set on order from Commodore, so I decided
to not type anything in and to just try and get their examples working
my own way with Commodore's Amiga.lib and include files.  Learn more
that way, you know. :-)  At worst, the book will make a good reference
guide on how to do certain Amiga operations.  I discovered while reading
it that I actually did pretty much know what I was doing, I just
needed to tie a few things together. 

I do recommend that anyone trying to program anything buy the RKMs.  I wish
I had a nickel for everytime I've seen the phrase, "for more information
on this subject, read the RKM."  I'm trying very hard to put off buying it
until the new 1.3 version comes out.  Anybody have any idea when that might
be??????


Happy assembling!
--Steve Crooks			...uunet!ingr!crooks!crooks   (UUCP)
				crooks!crooks@ingr.com	      (Internet)