One of the nicer bits the Electron inherited from the BBC is its built-in assembler. But differences between the two machines are fairly minimal, so most assembly books for the BBC apply equally to the Electron anyway. Mr. Birnbaum's book is no exception; it essentially boils down to a description of the 6502 microprocessor's operation including the addressing modes and their capabilities.

On the plus side, the book does contain some useful routines. They include multiplication and division, a high-resolution dump, a machine code monitor, some ideas on floating point representation, and a memory search routine. The book also contains in-depth information on the more obscure addressing modes and interrupts (Events).

Appendix 1 is an oddity with its descriptions of the assembly mnemonics. These appear to have been handwritten. If you have the Electron User Guide, this appendix is fairly redundant anyway.

The best book on Electron assembly language programming has a lot of programs. The best way to learn assembler is to do it, not read about it.

Kenn Garroch