Author's Preface
To The Revised Edition

In the past two years, many people have written to me about Map-
ping--mostly complimentary. I was gratified that no serious errors
were uncovered, only a few typos and minor corrections--a tribute
to COMPUTE!'s editing skills. There are too many people to mention
everyone, but I appreciate the efforts of you, the readers; please
continue to write to me, even if I can't answer every letter.
	Special thanks to Joe Miller of Koala Technologies (previously
with Atari, author of the Translator disk, and frequent CompuServe
user), Matt Ratcliff (remote sysop on the Gateway BBS), Randy Tjin of
Atari Canada, Neil Harris and Richard Frick of Atari USA for tech-
nical support, Bill Wilkinson for the frequent mentions in COMPUTE!
magazine, Gary Yost of Antic, and my friend Yoram Rostas for his in-
cessant prodding and poking into the machine. Also to Atari for its
"open system" policy which helped make this book possible.
	The Atari SIG on CompuServe has been a great help and sup-
port; it may be the best source of information and public domain
software for the Atari presently available. If you haven't used
CompuServe, I highly recommend that you do so; the sysop, Ron
Luks, and his group run a super online operation. Ron helped me
gather some of this information by putting up a special message ask-
ing for suggestions and answers to questions I had.
	Most of all, I owe an immeasurable amount of love, gratitude,
and affection to the ever-patient Susan McCallan, my constant
companion these past two-plus. How she stands me, I've never quite
figured out, but I hope she continues to do so for a long time. This
book is for her.

Publications and Products
Since the first edition, OSS has released an excellent new language,
Action!, as well as a considerably superior BASIC--BASIC XL. Action!
is probably the best language yet for the Atari; it's a bit like C and
Pascal, with a dash of Forth. I recommend it. (Russ Wetmore wrote
Atari HomePak in Action!. Even the Commodore 64 version was writ-
ten in Action! on the Atari.) Many Action! utilities and programs are
available on CompuServe's Atari SIG as well.
	Too many magazine articles have been published since the orig-
inal edition to cross-reference all of them, but Bill Wilkinson's "Insight:
Atari" in COMPUTE! magazine, Paul Swanson's "From Here to Atari"
in Micro, plus articles in Analog, Antic, Creative Computing, and
ROM have all provided their share of information. Atari's own maga-
zine, Atari Explorer, also has many useful articles, especially for
novice programmers