These books are specifically devoted to assembly language programming of the MC68020 microprocessor. MC68000 programming books that incorporate a separate chapter or appendix on the MC68020 or 68030 have been deliberately omitted. For a review of MC68000 assembly language programming books, see <CR> Rev. 8912-0854.

The recent book by Jaulent et al. concentrates on the 68020 and 68030 processors, the 68881 and 68882 floating point coprocessors, and the 68851 PMMU (an earlier book by Jaulent dealt with the MC68000 CPU [1]). It is oriented more toward architecture than toward programming and has few sample programs.

Harman’s book provides as thorough a coverage of programming the MC68020 as the earlier Harman and Lawson [2] did for the MC68000. The first four chapters place the MC68020 and 68030 CPUs in a general microprocessor system context. The treatments of number and character representations and addressing modes are particularly good. The next five chapters are devoted to programming techniques. As one might expect from Harman’s earlier work, the coverage is excellent and incorporates numerous programming examples. Chapters 10 through 12 discuss the MC68020 from the perspective of a system designer or programmer and include a discussion of MC68020 coprocessors. Chapter 13 discusses I/O programming in the context of the 133BUG monitor of the Motorola MVME133 MC68020-based single-board computer. The only substantial programming example, however, is a serial I/O example for the on-board MC68901 multifunction peripheral (USART and timer). Harman includes a separate chapter on the VMEbus, which discusses the VERSAdos operating system and the RMS68K kernel. Chapter 15 is devoted to the MC68030 processor. This material appears to have been added as an afterthought, and would better have been integrated throughout the text.

If anything, Harman’s 68020 book reads better than the earlier Harman and Lawson text [2]. Moreover, like its predecessor, the book makes extensive use of proprietary Motorola data sheets (such as the list of machine language characteristics in Appendix IV, which is reprinted from Motorola’s MC68020 32-bit microprocessor user’s manual [3]). All in all, Harman’s new text is a much better 68020(30) book than Jaulent, Baticle, and Pillot and, to borrow a phrase from an earlier review of Harman and Lawson (<CR>, Rev. 8505-0367), is the definitive 68020 text against which subsequent efforts should be compared.