The mini-assembler requires much more advanced knowledge than a macro assembler. The macro assembler will do a lot of the low level work for you without having to understand things like 2s complement notation, relative branches versus absolute jumps, and a bunch of other stuff.
yes but that's the orignal method of learning assembly, before progressing into macro assemblers, it's old-school and I think it's worth knowing the fundamentals, it makes you have a deeper understanding of the machine language
That's what I was thinking. Still thinking aloud: if I go directly from BASIC to a macro assembler, will I truly learn it? Will I miss important stuff? If I'm trying a sample problem from a book, then how will I know which parts of the example are the programming language and which parts are the macro system? That is one reason why I'm caught up on the mini assembler. The other is because everyone (for some value of "every") recommended the Assembly Lines book, and it says to start with the mini assembler, so I did.