Where did this book come from ?

The various chapters in this book were originally published in the QL Today magazine. The magazine has been running for 10 years since the demise of the other QL based commercial magazines on the market at the time. This one has now survived longer than all the commercial offerings - so we must be doing something right !

Dilwyn Jones, the then temporary editor (he lasted 9 and a bit years - we have a strange definition of 'temporary' in the QL world) originally contacted me back in the mid 1990's and asked me to put together a couple of articles on begginning assembly language programming. Little knowing how long it would last, I agreed and started writing.

Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to really plan what I was going to do and I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew at the time (I'm still in the same position today !) so the 'flow' of the following chapters may not be quite as nice as it could have been. On the other hand, had I planned it all in fine detail, I still wouldn't have started writing the first chapter.

The lack of planning has led to a number of articles in the series being prefixed by quite a few bug reports outlining problems and downright errors in the article (or articles) that went before. While this is good for increasing my 'word count', it's not good for the reader. The following chapters have been 'bug fixed' so that you should be able to trust what yo read in each chapter.

Where other readers of QL Today have made comments on the articles, these are included - if appropriate - at the relevant place.

Hopefully, you will find the following useful.