This book is indeed what it represents itself to be, a complete description ofthe Motorola MC 68000 microprocessor family. It contains a compendium of theassembly language for the microprocessor and something about interface design.Unfortunately, it contains nothing about operating systems for the 68000, norwhat application programs are available to work under the operating systems thatdo exist.
What a boring book this must have been to write] The authors must have had toascertain that they included every design and language detail. It is asimilarly boring chore to read the book from cover to cover. However, that isnot how one should approach the book.
The authors do not make it clear what they expect their audience to be; theysimply say professionals and students. However, I see this as mostly ahandbook. There is a fair index and table of contents, so you can findwhatever you need to know. Most facets of the chip are explained. Forinstance, I examined the discussion of addressing modes and it seems clear andcomplete.
There is information on other members of the family, but not in the samedetail. Still, if you need to know about the 68010 you can find some summaryinformation here. I don’t think a user of the book needs to be informed aboutnumber systems or character codes, but the information is presented.
Since a user would seek functional details, I don’t feel that it is a deficitthat occasionally a few concepts get garbled. Let me give an example of thelatter. On p. 36, the authors state, “The execution of an illegal instructionis an example of an operation that causes a trap.” Of course, the computercannot execute an illegal instruction; that is why it initiates a trapinstead. A footnote explains an illegal instruction as follows:“an illegalinstruction is a machine language instruction with a bit pattern not recognizedby the CPU.” The philosophical dilemma of this statement is not recognized bythe authors] But seriously, I recommend the book as a source for anyone needinginformation about this microprocessor family (and not to anyone else).
