One great let-down of the Commodore 64 is its archaic version of Basic. It's not surprising therefore that machine code is a subject that most Commodore 64 owners decide to delve into at some stage.

For this reason, machine code books keep appearing on the bookshelves, and this title is just one more to add to the throng.

However, this book does stand out from a lot of the others that are available, as it certainly is advanced. Even though the book does start off with the basics of machine code it is far too technical and a beginner would probably find it tough going.

I got the distinct impression that this is why the word "advanced" was stuck on the front of the title. This means that the first section of the book becomes no more than a refresher course in machine code and a few people will find that they can skip quite a bit of it.

Once you actually get into the book you will soon find it becoming an extremely useful reference guide as well as being an excellent tutorial in the way that your C64 works.

Sections cover sort routines, high resolution graphics, and input/output techniques with a few simple circuits to build. Use of sprites in machine code and the sound chip are mentioned only briefly and for a book claiming to be for the C64 these subjects could have been dealt with in a much more informative way.

All in all, this is a handy book to have around.

Stuart Cooke