🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Mar1.183809.4264@bath.ac.uk> exspes@bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) writes:
[ about the abacus gem books ]
>
>Does this mean they've fixed them, then?

Well, my experience with the Abacus GEM book (which is better than
their others, I think) is that the errors in the 1st edition fall in 3
areas:

1) obvious typoes, easy to correct, some only after a little
   experimentation :-(
2) errors which are copies of errors in DRI's documentation (which
   Atari sells in its devkit)
3) failing to explain which calls are only useful when GDOS is
   around. I've seen several people asking questions here who
   obviously tried to read the manual and were very confused on this
   score.

As such, I've had reasonable success using it for some small GEM
stuff, although I never tried anything with GDOS.

I haven't read the 3rd edition, but I believe a review was once posted
here? I also don't know if any of the GEM books have useful tricks
like the little routine that intercepts right-button events and turns
them into left-button events. I'd also love to see someone do a SANE
binding for GEM calls that passes pointers to structures instead of a
bunch of variables that everyone keeps in structs anyway. I managed to
cut the size of the GEM demo program source in half that way, and the
object code for the demo itself (sans bindings) shrank 35% or so. Less
bloody stack-pushing and popping for stuff that's going to get popped
and shoved into arrays anyway.

>My present favorites are the 3-volume Compute! series (one book each on
>AES, VDI, and TOS) and Katherine Peel's 'The Concise Atari ST 68000
>Programmer's Reference Guide' -- but not the first edition which was
>lacking any form of index.

Indexes do come in handy.

Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                  Astrophysicists for Choice.