Customer Reviews

PC Intern: The Encyclopedia of System Programming (Developers Series)

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Even though this book contains a lot of information about low-level programming, you should read it very, very carefully. The book would have received a rating of 10 were it not for the fact that there are several errors across various chapters. Some of the book's explanations can also be a bit misleading at times.

Here are some examples of the errors you'll find:

"However, the joysticks can be monitored only with the polling method because a special hardware interrupt, which executes when the user moves the joystick or presses a button, is assigned to joystick cards" - page 289.

The above is not true: a game card does not generate any hardware interrupts. In other words, no hardware interrupts are "assigned to joystick cards".

"If you want to access the keyboard at its lowest level, you must capture and redirect keyboard hardware interrupt 90H." - page 283

Actually, the right answer to the above would be would be interrupt 09H. The digits are reversed.

"One of the special features of the PIC is to 'cascade' interrupts [...] this method has been used so 16 different hardware interrupt devices can be handled" - page 207

No. Today's IBM-PCs can service the interrupt requests of up to 15 hardware devices. This is due to the fact that one of the interrupt request lines, which would otherwise be used for this purpose, is needed by the system to cascade (connect together) its two interrupt controllers (PICs). This leaves only 15 lines available for use by hardware devices.

There is also another problem with this book. While in some cases it explains how gain direct access to certain devices (like the keyboard controller), in other cases it simply talks about the BIOS functions which allow access to devices (such as game cards). Despite all of the above, there IS a lot of information in this book, and it could actually prove useful if read with a bit of skepticism.

We used this book in a systems programming class I had at IIT in Chicago. It is not the end all "bible of PC", but it is certainly a very, very good book. Much of the information you will never use, but there will come a time when you will need that one sub-routine that no one else can find or understands, and you pull a code snippet out of this book, apply it to your code, and appear "god-like" to your colleagues. This has happend at least five times since I've owned both editions, and for that, the book has paid for itself. If you write code that goes beyond what the component libraries in your prgramming environment can provide, such as multimedia, games, or networking, it would be a wise investment to have this book in your arsenal. David C. Freeman

Well, what to say about this book ? On one hand, it has really good examples for system programming. On the other hand, you sometimes should ask yourself: "Man, this is a good code and it works well...but, what is the use for myself?" What I want to say, is that you often learn good tricks but you will never need them. Sometimes there are also things, which are very difficult, but not very well explained and you need another book to understand it completely. But at least the biggest part of this book is very useful, and every ambitious DOS coder should own it...unfortunately, the later books of this series also contain Windows-programming...Windows and System-programming....hmmm. (Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Germany)

I tend to agree with adrian2's comments. Abacus books, in general, often have flaws. Many exist in their Atari ST documentation, still this book contains many things the expanding programmer will need to know to do more than just use existing library routines found in their language. The code and documentation will help you do lots of fancy tricks in DOS. The 1992 version has lots of Quick BASIC code and if you program in Quick or Power BASIC you might want to find the 1992 edition. There is also THE DOS PROGRAMMER'S REFERENCE by Jamsa, which has less Quick BASIC code, but is also an excellent book. Both should be in any serious DOS programmers libraries.