I didn't realize he was Canadian - as a child I got so much mileage out of Machine Language for the Commodore 64[0]. I used to think of my program, get out sheets of graph paper and flip through a table of opcodes I wanted to use, get their decimal rep, and write out the list of numbers in a long column, then go to my computer and POKE them into place and watch a spite come to life, or the screen change colour. So much fun had with that book.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Machine_Language_for_the_Commodo...