Owen Bishop welcomes us to the audio-visual paradise of the Vic 20 and stresses above all that "computing is fun". I'm sure he is not suggesting that home computing *wasn't* fun before sound and colour, although one gets the impression that the book's attitude is one of coaxing indolent teenagers away from videogame parlours and the television and onto the Vic keyboard.

The first two chapters are rather simplistic - reassuring perhaps to a first time user who has not read the manual, but rather irritating to anyone else. We are told how to unpack the box and connect the plug.

The rest of the book could be divided into three parts; colour graphics, applied mathematics and sound. Owen Bishop chooses to separate these sections into nine chapters - largely, I suspect, to make it easier to read (although the chapter titles 'More About Graphics' and 'More About Sound' do nothing to enhance this illusion).

In between PEEKing and POKEing colour and sound out of RAM, we are introduced to the major functions of the keyboard and taught how to use variables, arrays and various programming techniques. The functions are well applied to numerous entertaining programs: there are useful programs too to design your own colour characters and invent sounds and animated graphics.

For the most part, the listed programs are good, although yet again the graphics characters do not come out very well on the printed page. Good games programs are conspicuously absent - and it may surprise nobody to learn that Mr. Bishop is also the author of The Vic 20 Games Book.

The book ends with some useful hints on memory saving and writing faster programs; and the appendix contains some potentially helful tables.

Generally speaking, the book is somewhat padded out to justify the £5.95 price tag. It has some useful material though, it is well structured and illustrated, and it is written in a fairly readable style.