68000 Book Review (Part 2)

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Continuing from Part 1 of my book review, here’s Part 2.

68000 Assembly Language: Techniques for Building Programs (Donald Krantz & James Stanley)

This is a software book with about half of the book dedicated to describing the 68000 instruction set architecture and the other half describing a text editor project.  If you already have the manuals for the 68000, the architecture content is redundant.  The text editor, YASE, however, is more interesting.  It’s a sizable project with good documentation on both design decisions and 68000-specific implementation.  YASE should be a great example for learning 68000 programming and organizing mid-sized code bases.  Also, YASE is modular, and you could reuse some components, such as the printf routines.

This a good book, but I don’t find it as timeless as the Wilcox text.  If you’re learning 68000 assembly language programming, this is an excellent resource.  Otherwise, it’s an interesting piece of history that I wouldn’t mind on my shelf.

Table of Contents

  • 1 68000 Architecture
  • 2 Addressing Modes
  • 3 Data Transfer Instructions
  • 4 Arithmetic Instructions
  • 5 Logical, Shift, and Rotate Instructions
  • 6 Jump, Branch, and Trap Instructions
  • 7 Bit Instructions
  • 8 Miscellaneous Instructions
  • 9 The Nitty-Gritty Details
  • 10 Parameter Passing Techniques
  • 11 Exceptions
  • 12 Text Editor Overview
  • 13 Input/Output Interfaces
  • 14 Data Management
  • 15 The User Interface
  • 16 The Hard Stuff That the Computer Usually Takes Care Of
  • 17 Bit-Mapped Graphics
  • 18 On the Bare Metal
  • 19 The 68010 and 68020 Processors
  • 20 The Last Step
  • Appendix A The Rest of YASE
  • Appendix B Math Routines
  • Appendix C Instruction Format Summary (from Motorola)
  • Appendix D MC68000 Instruction Execution Times (from Motorola)
  • Appendix E ASCII Table
  • Index