Compute!'s Second Book of Atari
In the early 80s, finding detailed information about the Atari 8-bit computers was difficult. Atari-specific magazines had not yet launched so your options were general computing magazines such as Compute! or Creative Computing or the ACE newsletter.
Seeing an unmet need, Compute! published some Atari-related books with rather unoriginal names. Their first book was called Compute!’s First Book of Atari and primarily consisted of articles that were previously published in the magazine. I looked at that a couple years ago, which you can read here:
Compute's First Book of Atari
In the early days of home computing there was not always much information to work with. This was especially a problem for the Atari 400/800 computers because, although they were incredibly powerful and far ahead of other computers when they were introduced in 1979, Atari did not initially release any technical information on the computers (beyond some BASIC reference manuals).
Now it’s time to take a look at their second Atari-themed book, appropriately titled Compute!’s Second Book of Atari. Released in 1982, this book contains about 250 pages of Atari-specific information and this time it is all-new articles that had not previously been published.
It has five chapters:
Utilities
Programming Techniques
Advanced Graphics and Game Utilities
Applications
Beyond BASIC
Let’s look at it in more detail.