A Review of ``Programming Games for Atari 2600'' by Oscar Toledo Gutierrez

The book under review has the following ISBN: 978-1-387-83814-1

The book has the following website: http://nanochess.org

I found this book whilst browsing the AtariAge forums, and bought it on a whim alongside a few other
books on the topic of programming games for the Atari VCS and whatnot.  The book is perhaps the most
flawed book I've reviewed, but the flaws are generally ignorable, and I can still much recommend it.

The foreward is written by famed Atari VCS programmer David Crane.  The first four chapters describe
the basic features of the Atari VCS hardware and how to use them; despite my having long had a vague
idea of how it worked, seeing the details, particularly regarding horizontal sprite positioning, was
very informative; I'm left with the realization that Atari VCS programming is easier than I thought.

The fifth through ninth chapters each describe the implementation of a simple game clone, growing in
complexity as the book continues.  I hate to write that I didn't particularly enjoy the way the code
was shown, but I'm very particular about this manner of thing; I would've split each page pair, half
description and half code, and I feel this would be nicer than splitting the code up with paragraphs
constantly.  I believe the ability to view the program uninterrupted to be valuable for instruction.
As it stands, I feel I won't have a good grasp on a few things until my second reading of this book.
The tenth chapter discusses advance techniques and the appendices hold some various nice references.

My grievances with this book are minor, but should be listed.  Most noticeably, I dislike the use of
images generated by neural network nonsense throughout this book between its chapters; I'd recommend
the author avoid this for his future books.  Second most noticeable are the minor grammatical errors
common throughout the book; occasionally, a similar but incorrect word is used; they're not horrible
mistakes, any reader should only notice them for a moment before reading onwards, but they're there.

Regardless of the flaws, the book is a very enjoyable and light read, holding many helpful diagrams,
illustrations, screenshots of games, and the like.  I'll probably read it again before using it as a
reference with the other manuals I purchased.  I can recommend it to aspiring Atari VCS programmers.
.