Commodore 64 Exposed: 1 (Retro Reproductions)

An essential book for anyone interested in C64 development.

Spot on A++

So for context, I was born after the C64 era was well and truly over, and picked this up to accompany a "TheC64" machine I picked up as a curiosity to see what the "olden days" were like. The book is an excellent reference manual, (Especially if you're trying to go "old-school" and try to learn it without just Googling, as is common nowadays.) but is a bit inconsistent to what level it wants to explain things. In some areas it caters well to newcomers to the platform, and at other times it assumes you know what the author is talking about and is very abrupt. Likewise, I think the ordering is a bit weird, with a huge section on interfacing with the SID chip in the middle of the book, immediately after the "welcome to BASIC" section. (Even Commodore themselves focused on basic screen graphics first in the manual before getting to sound.)I can only presume it's an excellent reproduction because there's a few mistakes that a proof-read would have picked up. The publisher themselves mention it's a 1:1 reprint without any editing themselves, but still.There are too many typos in the book. (e.g. Floppy Draves, Porgram.) It's understandable given it's a reprint of the first edition, and this was before auto-spellcheck software, but it's quite jarring to see nowadays. It also appears that the book was originally going to be written for the VIC-20, as it alludes to programming for the VIC-20 several times and a few of the formulae are for the VIC-20 instead of the C64. They're very similar in architecture, but a newcomer might not notice and make a mistake as a result. An example of this is when telling you how to index screen memory, and it tells you how to index with the 22 columns of the VIC instead of the 40 columns of the C64.The quality of the ink printing is inconsistent too, with some pages fading away and others being very bold, clearly having just been refilled with ink. BASIC programs range from having been typed up and looking crisp, to clearly being a scan of a page that was then printed. The longer programs that span multiple pages are very prone to this.All in all I don't regret the purchase, and it's been helpful, but I think if you're a true beginner like myself (although I have a background in low-level embedded programming, so familiar with the concepts) then it's unreasonable to think this is the only book you'll need - unless you want to spend as long as those in the 80's did to learn how to program it.