His Micro's Voice

On thumbing through this book I have to admit how promising it looks from its chapter headings diagrams and programs. It seems just the text book a music teacher would need to be able to key in a program and put notes on the stave with the associated clef sign. A note at the beginning of the book says that all programs have been thoroughly tested on a BBC Micro fitted with Basic 2. They may have run when they were complete if they had been keyed in correctly, but in certain cases vital information has been deleted and the recommendation to see your dealer if they don't work is utter nonsense!

Why confuse the User Defined Character (UDC) explanation with Binary? Would it not be better and simpler to label the columns 1 to 128 and tell the reader to add up along the row? There is plenty of room on the right of the diagrams of the UDCs (p106) to show the addition sum used for the VDU23 statement.

Mistakes abound so you must know how to key! There are PRINTTABs without the semi-colons, character string statements without the brackets and GOTO commands with nowhere to go. And the mistakes are not even consistent, they appear in some places and not in others.

It is generally accepted that to make any progress in music, you need a knowledge of theory and I was pleased to see the recommendation of the Associated Board's book on rudiments and theory. Don't bother to key in the longer listings unless you are prepared to key correctly, spend an awful lot of time debugging and write your own piece of program for that part which is missing (bar lines, for instance in The Advanced Music Writer).

On the whole - bottom of the class!

P. R. Broomfield