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!