Like many others, I've been a fan of Don Lancaster for some time, and I'm glad to say this 'cookbook' (volume 2 in his machine-language programming series) is fully up to scratch.

This one deals with the nitty-gritty form of programming... the hard way. In Hex. Yes, no-one in their right mind does this, and any sensible person uses an assembler, but Mr. Lancaster makes a strong case against the use of such utilities, at least for the first few steps.

He thinks the subtleties of machine-language are obscured by the use of an assembler, and when the tools he employs are examined closely, this starts to make sense.

His main tool is one you make for yourself, a set of index-cards which you draw up from your CPU spec-sheet according to a tightly-defined set of rules, with one card for each op-code, so you must phyiscally transcribe much of the fabricator's documentation.

It sounds like a chore, and it is. But having it done for the MC68000, I assure you that you get a very much stronger feel for the machine, and in the case of micro-coded CPUs, like the 68000, the overall structure of the various op-codes and their relationship becomes much clearer.

This is Mr. Lancaster's intention, and he backs up this opinion that though Basic may be fun, and compilers are useful, all really good programming much be done in machine code. Indeed, his barbed comments about Basic and Pascal make some of the more entertaining sections of the book...

He is careful to cover a sufficiently wide range of CPUs, though it's a pity he didn't discuss the 68000 or 808X chips.

Richard King