A huge difference between 1985 and now, is my access to books. The internet is an amazing place. I can find used books from the 80s to buy and have shipped or I can find PDF version of long since out of print books. My library of Commodore 64 and 6502 programming books has become fairly fat.
Some of these books I had when I was a kid. The Programmer’s Reference Guide was certainly one of them. I also had Compute’s, Mapping the Commodore 64. These two books have proven to be invaluable again. I have to admit, they make a lot more sense to me now than they ever did when I was younger.
If you’re interested in PDF books, check out archive.org. Their C64 book collection is huge! You can also check out DLH’s Commodore Books. I found my assembler at Lyonlabs.org along with the manual. I went with what I knew, but there may be a better assembler out there. You should try them out before you commit. You could also try some other programming languages or maybe a different OS altogether.
So, with a lot of reading and some playing around, some of the concepts I was having so much trouble in the past are starting to click.
Hurray for the internet!