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Books 331 processed information to control some continuously variable process, the binary numbers must be converted back to an appropriate analogue signal. Carr’s book starts by explaining very simplysome of the principlesof both digital to analogue (D/A) and analogue to digital conversion (AID). Rather surprisingly, the author has included a general chapter on the applications of operational amplifiers, an important topic which normally would have been dealt with by referenceto other volumes.His succinct treatment is, however, quite useful. The central chapters concentrate on typical AID and D/A applications using specified integrated circuit devicesand some hybrid (mixed component) circuits. In the final chapters, the author discusses input/output port addressing and decoding in microcomputers and then ends rather abruptly with a chapter on active filters. The book by Charles Adams is a difficult one to review. Certainly it has many of the good qualities that I have suggestedare associated with Tab books. In his book, apparently intended for the complete novice, the author describes in great detail an ambitious project to build from discrete components and a handful of integrated circuits a simple computer based on Intel’s popular but now slightly dated chip, the 8080A. This is a project for an energetic enthusiast with time to spare. If the reader wants an inexpensive but truly useful microcomputer, then the Charles Adam version would scarcely be worth the hours of patient soldering demanded, for without expansion the computer has no cassette interface and only an output display of two hexadecimal digits. However, the author makes it clear that the purpose of building his micro would be not so much the finishedproduct but the understanding which would be gained as to how a microcomputer works and is programmed (in machine code, of course). Adam’s book is really a detailed account of how to construct a microprocessor development board complete with an EPROM (erasable-read-only-memory chip) programmer. The instructions, which are clear and convincing with detailed wiring charts, are accompanied by considerable explanation asto how the microprocessor works and how to write machine language programs in 8080code, etc. By the time the board is built and tested it is possiblethat the reader will then understand enough to expand the assembly into a real microcomputer complete with cassette and video interfaces, and typewriter-style keyboard. However, Adams only hints in his final chapter how to do this. The picture on the cover of my copy is misleadingin that it showssuch acomputer completed. Neverthelessthe whole project could be very rewarding. Both these Tab books are the results of bold attempts to solve an impossibly difficult problem-namely, how to present a very advanced and rapidly changing technology in sucha waythat it can be applied and understood by those who wish to use it but do not want to study its theoretical background. It is inevitable that they succeedonly partially. Microprocessors: Principles and Applications. M. J. Debenham. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979.90 pp.. illus. Paper, $8.75. ISBN: 0-08024207 -3. Reviewed by Jonathan Fish* In the last fewyearsthere has been,understandably, a small stampede to publish popular books on that ‘modem miracle’, the microprocessor. M. J. Debenham’s contribution is both inexpensive (by current standards) and extremely brief (90 pages including the glossary and index). I liked its price but not its brevity. The author explains in his preface that his book is ‘addressed to all who want to “catch up”, to those who are in the process of learning for the first time, and to all those who wish to know what makes a microprocessor what it is’. I quote these words because I was able to form only a qualified opinion on this book‘s usefulnessand I feelthat it should bejudged in relation to its author’s intentions. I believe that it is completely impossible to satisfy the needs of such a wide range of readership in a book of this length. My chief criticism is that the author seems to waver in the text in the level of prior knowledge which he assumes his reader to possess.On some pages he seems to beaddressing the complete beginner, a simpleton even (‘From the time man first...

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