I expect this book to have limited appeal to the readership of Computing Reviews and in the marketplace at large. This hobbyist-style book goes into considerable detail regarding the implementation of FORTH on the i8051 family of microcontrollers (down to circuit diagrams, PCB layouts, and wire-wrap board schematics).

The particular version of FORTH used in this book emanated from a project on a cryptographic lock for a missile launch controller at Sandia laboratories. The original project was implemented in FigFORTH on an i8085 microprocessor, and was subsequently ported to an i8051 microcontroller. The reason for this port was the emergence of the i8051 as “the most popular of the 8-bit microcontrollers.” The justification for using FORTH was its “amalgamation of an operating system, a high level language system, compiler, assembler, linker, loader, editor, disassembler, decompiler…all the software tools required to produce some software products are included in the FORTH environment.” Payne further maintains that “FORTH is one of the major software technologies appropriate for embedded controller software development.”

Almost two-thirds of this book is devoted to appendices--19 in all. These primarily contain code listings, and the author states in the preface that these programs are available on disk from “participating i8051 family hardware vendors.” The book contains ten chapters, five of which are ridiculously short (chapters 5 through 9 comprise a total of 33 pages).

The book sometimes mixes seemingly unrelated topics. For example, the preface includes an out-of-context paragraph beginning “We have a software Newton in our midst: Charles Moore, FORTH’s inventor…” and toward the end of chapter 1, we are treated to a single unrelated paragraph beginning “The Harris RTX2000 microprocessor is designed for FORTH…” The i8051 FORTH implementation has every appearance of being sound, but I cannot help but wonder how the publisher expects to recoup production costs on such a highly specialized book.