6502 Machine & Assembly Language Programming for Apple/Commodore/Atari [Tapa blanda]

TAB became well known for poor schematics, sloppy examples, superficial subject coverage, weak projects and seemingly unedited textual content. the TAB imprint is also famous for sucking-in many an unwary customer with slick covers (not the case here, however), coupled with equally well designed TOCs that give the impression of great value and comprehensive coverage of a given topic (the book ''build your own working robot'' is one *infamous* example). many a customer has run to the checkout after excitedly flipping through the book and seeing lots of tables and illustrations which, taken together, seem to confirm the already mentioned Cover/TOC's implicit claims.

... then said customer arrives home to be shocked at the actual content, much of which can be found (without the typos and inexplicable omissions of crucial data, mind you) in the manufacturer's documentation. redundant (and often unnecessary) tables of resistor color values, hex/dec/oct/bin conversion tables and ASCII value tables ...

this was almost a rite of passage in the 70s, and seemingly everyone i knew at the time was suckered at one point or another. many of us swore on our dead Mothers' graves to never again buy a TAB book, but the publisher eventually noticed and started changing the ''publisher'' listed on the cover, only mentioning '[the publisher] is an imprint of TAB' on the copyright page, in small print. careful examination (after having again purchased a crappy TAB title in disguise) helped us steer clear once more.

pay more than a dollar for a TAB book at your own discretion, but know that my hands are clean : i have tried to warn you !