This book is surely destined to become the Bible of every dedicated user of the BBC micro. It covers very comprehensively and in considerable detail, every aspect of the machine's operation. It is not primarily intended as a book for the beginner, though there is much that the beginner would find interesting. The book is intended for the experienced user, and moreover one who has some familiarity with 6502 assembler. The purpose of this book is to supplement the BBC User Guide by providing a much more detailed and comprehensive description of 6502 assembly language programming, the operating system and the BBC microcomputer hardware. The book is spiral-bound and matches very closely the appearance of the BBC User Guide.

The book begins by surveying the various operating system commands followed by a comprehensive description of the 6502 assembler language that is contained within BBC Basic.

A very substantial chapter provides a detailed description of all FX (OSBYTE) calls and a further chapter similarly covers all the OSWORD calls. One very useful section describes the vectoring mechanism of the Beeb and gives details of each vectored address.

Events and interrupts are clearly described with a number of program examples. There is also a very good section on paged ROMs with details of how to interface a ROM with the operating system.

The remainder of the book, some 90 pages, describes the hardware features of the Beeb, including the video 6845, the ULA, both 6522 VIAs and all the various interfaces. There are also 40 pages of appendices and even a main circuit diagram of the Beeb, courtesy of Acorn.

Many sections of the book are provided with example programs and there are also many clear and useful diagrams. This is a book which the experienced user will delight in dipping into as more and more information is revealed and explained.

This book is a must, and is excellent value at the price of £12.95 for over 509 pages packed with facts.