Understanding the Apple IIe

What Hacker News says

1. ksherlockJan 2026
   For Apple-II specific info, consider

   The Assembly Lines book -- https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner

   Understanding the Apple IIe -- https://archive.org/details/understandingapp0000sath

   Understanding the Apple II -- https://archive.org/details/understanding_the_apple_ii

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2. apricotApr 2015
   One idiosyncratic list coming up.

   Kernighan and Plauger, Software Tools, had a very big influence on my coding style and appreciation for the Unix Way.

   If you want to learn more about Lisp macros, the exuberant book Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte is a fun read.

   The best book to learn how to implement Forth-like languages is Threaded Interpretive Languages by R. Loelige. Dated and long out of print, but worth getting. Plus, as a Byte Book, it has one of those classic Byte drawings on the cover.

   T is to Scheme what Scheme is to Lisp (kind of), and The T Programming Language by Jonathan Rees is the kind of book that cleanses your soul.

   Donald Knuth's The Stanford Graphbase contains literate programs for several elegant graph algorithms.

   Jim Sather's Understanding the Apple IIe is a terrific description of a computer from the bottom up, and shows you how deep knowledge of the hardware enables you to write software that breaks all the rules (viz. the recent demo that gets 1024 colors on an IBM CGA adapter).

   On a more personal note, Puzzled Programmers by Michael Wiesenberg was a book published by Microsoft Press in the late 1980s. It contained 15 problems reminiscent of what you can find nowadays on Project Euler -- math problems for computer solution, but where brute force search is not enough. I spent many hours on them when I was in high school.

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3. not_clearJan 2026
   As mentioned in the link above, Assembly Lines is still in print as a paper book (maybe it's print on demand, but it's a hardcover).

   I just noticed that Understanding the Apple IIe also got a re-issue from Call-A.P.P.L.E. in 2024 (print edition from Lulu) - https://www.callapple.org/books-3/understanding-the-apple-ii... .

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