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Need a Book reccomendation.


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I was initially going to start to learn Assembly, to program with my 800XL. But a lot of the books I see on 6502 for Atari have BASIC mixed into them, and also suggest that you know Atari BASIC to be able to follow along with it. More often than not, reading through them, I don't know enough about BASIC to know what they are talking about. So I decided I would take a step back, and try to learn Atari BASIC first. But there are so.....many.....books..... on this subject that I don't know where to start. I'd like to simply start from the beginning, learning as if I knew nothing of BASIC(even though I know little tidbits of it - enough to make small text-based programs, but nothing fancy with graphics or sound).

 

So I am wondering if anyone has any recommendations on what book I should start with to learn Atari BASIC.  And then once I learn most or all I can of BASIC, where to go from there to begin to learn 6502 Assembly for the Atari(since, there's almost as many books about this as there are for learning BASIC).  

 

EDIT: Just for clarification, I want to be able to use my 800XL for these things. I don't have any access to the new BASICs like Turbo BASIC XL, or FastBasic, or anything like that. For now all I have is the Atari BASIC Rev. B(will soon be C) that's built into my machine. So that's what recommendations should be built upon. 

Edited by TheRaven81
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Can´t help you with the BASIC part, but you can start directly with assembler, when installing WUDSN IDE and then follow those nice little tutorials from JAC! :

 

http://www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/tutorials

 

Those are really quick and easy and give you fast success. Afterwards you could dig into the theory of assembly language, especially with books from Rodney Zaks.

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On 4/12/2020 at 6:26 PM, skr said:

Can´t help you with the BASIC part, but you can start directly with assembler, when installing WUDSN IDE and then follow those nice little tutorials from JAC! :

 

http://www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/tutorials

 

Those are really quick and easy and give you fast success. Afterwards you could dig into the theory of assembly language, especially with books from Rodney Zaks.

that's nice, and I appreciate your suggestion, but:

#1: I was asking for book recommendations, not for PC software to do programming with. I don't want to do that.

#2: Even if I did want to program things on my PC, I have no way to get those things to my Atari to use them in a real machine and not an emulated one. I don't personally have access to any of the newer hardware/software to do that sort of thing. I can't afford it.

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Ah, ok. Then I would recommend you to this page:

 

https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Atari BASIC

 

It´s partly in english and you also find some links to books and reference cards there. Should be a good point for starters.

 

You might want to start with the book "Atari BASIC" by Albrecht, Finkel and Brown and parallely use the reference cards, which you also find in the Atariwiki.

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Appreciate you want to learn BASIC, but it would also help to get to know the machine itself to make more

sense out of examples etc.

 

When I started, I bought "The Master Memory Map" and later "Mapping the Atari" which is a fantastic reference book.

 

Lots of goodies here

 

http://www.atarimania.com/documents-atari-400-800-xl-xe-books_1_8.html

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If you are going to be using plain old Atari BASIC then you will need the Atari Basic Reference manual, this is not  a teach yourself Basic book but it does include several useful examples and detailed explanations of all the commands.

 

The best general book on learning 6502 assembly is indeed programming the 6502 by Rodney Zaks.

 

When you want to learn more about the Atari hardware and OS then you really must grab a copy of De Re Atari. This is a sort of guide to the heavy weight Technical Reference Notes that you may also like to get ?

 

There really IS a DOS 2.0 manual and you should get a copy of that with the 2.5 supplement if you can.

 

Happy reading ? 

 

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