Sixty programs to type in for a fiver? Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Pan Books and Personal Computer News have ganged up to produce this volume, packed with programs for the BBC. Some of the names will be familiar; the operation of some will seem familiar despite their names.

A few of the listings reveal themselves as conversions from other machines. There are lots of GOSUBs and GOTOs alongside the DEF FNs and *FX calls. The listings are accompanied by no documentation or explanation of how the program does whatever it does and the lack of structure can make programs awkward to follow. Some do have PROCs with meaningful names and this makes the path the programs follow much easier to trace. Still, these listings offer little to the novice programmer wishing to learn from his/her hours of typing in.

Newcomers, I'm afraid, will end up with a workable program, but little understanding.

Most of the programs are games of one sort or another although Morse Tutor, Critical Path Analysis, Numbers, Omnicalendar and Biorhythms break the mould. Each program is preceded by a short explanation of what the finished product does and a bit of background to set the imagination going and encourage the typing in of what can be up to eight pages of listing. All game-playing or input instructions reside within the programs themselves. The listings are excellently reproduced (except for a few smudged $ signs). They all come from the original printed listing. The introduction assures the buyer that all the programs have been exhaustingly tested, so there should be no problems when correctly typed in.

Looking at the games themselves confirmed my fears about the graphics and sound of the programs. Buzzy Bee turned out to be quite fun. A little bird runs about the bottom of the screen pecking away at the stems of a row of plants. If any of the plants should reach the top then the bee drops down, takes the nectar and you have lost. You are told how long you survived and there is a hi-score. The user-defined characters are average and there is an attempt at simulating the buzzing sound of the bee.

Sheep trial takes place on a deadly boring green baize background with single lines to delineate the field and pen. There are no sound effects and the four sheep and dog are miniscule. The cursor keys are used for controlling the rather jumpy movement of the dog and they are never easy to handle.

'Top' is a racing game which employs crude game-board graphics, a track created from text characters (a device necessary only on the smallest machines nowadays) and other features you do not buy a BBC Micro to enjoy. None of the error trapping is foolproof and Escape and Break keys are not disabled, at least in the programs I tried.