After displaying the ball, the next section of the book covers player sprites, but no movement yet.  Since each demo builds upon the previous one, typing the code has become easier and some of the instruction sets are starting to make sense to me instead of just appearing to be a random set of three letters.  I'd recommend that anyone doing this for the first time type up each program from beginning to end instead of just copy/pasting work from the previous one.  This has helped me quite a bit.

After finishing the program, I compiled it, then ran it in Stella and got this:

Well, that wasn't quite what I wanted as the top part of the screen was supposed to be blue and the bottom half a sand color...and equally divided.  For about 10 minutes, I meticulously compared my code to the example in the book and couldn't figure out what I had done incorrectly.  After a few more times of looking things over, I noticed that I typed "LDX #$91" instead of "LDX #91" near the end of the program.  After correcting this, it displayed properly.