These two books add to a plethora on hardware interfacing on the Apple, and reflect diverse approaches to the subject.

Apple II Applications differs from Hardware Interfacing since it uses commercially available hardware, showing how these may be used in real applications. Mr. Uffenbeck shows you how to build the hardware.

This sounds as though the second book is better value, covering, as it does, a broader scope, but overall Apple II Applications is more likely to be useful, simply because the kind of boards described in Hardware Interfacing aren't especially complex or specialised, and hence not overly expensive. Anyone using this kind of circuitry would probably be better advised to just buy a board.

If you buy rather than build, you'll find that accompanying software is either non-existent or pitiful, which is where Mr. de Jong's book comes in, making your new toy understandable.

This book deals with the different classes of interfacing under fairly arbitrary but reasonable headings, so with a modicum of analysis to a problem one section or another will probably offer a solution.

Mr. Uffenbeck's book could be useful if you need to design and build a one-off card, or to learn about the principles involved. In general, his problems are less obviously useful, though again, a little analysis of a problem will often find that the needed details are handled in his book, which is broken up into a set of experiments.

If I have any dislikes of the book, it's the total reliance upon Basic as the programming language, which simply isn't suitable. Also, I'm not inspired by the idea that I should spend considerable time building something I can buy for a modest sum.

Jim Ballard