These books are aimed at very different markets - the first sets out to be a guide to an Epson printer plus any micro, while the second is almost without reference to particular micros, and is really an extended Epson user manual.

Neither is the ideal guide to the Epson printers. Susan Curran has attempted to write a book which can be used by beginners, but has fallen into the trap of trying to be all things to all micro owners. There is really very little to interest the BBC owner in the packages and techniques needed for the QL and vice versa.

Further, the book is poorly illustrated, and manages to cover descriptions of seven printers, explain interfacing (in a rather muddled way) and connecting up, coding and controlling the printer without using a single diagram or program listing!

The programs provided seem pretty banal. Since the Epson printers are now produced with comprehensive and comprehensible user guides, full of program examples, there is little point in publishing listings which don't add anything new. The only exception is that the programs do include translations from Microsoft Basic into various dialects, including BBC Basic.

The coverage of packages is confused and not very helpful. Clearly the author's version of Wordstar is patched by an entirely different mechanism from mine and that in the Epson Printer User's Handbook, and her discussion of SuperBase adds nothing that the manual does not already say.

Ms. Curran is not too knowledgable about graphics dumps. Discussion of 'pattern dumps' is vague, and all the examples are printed using a utility ROM on the BBC Micro - quite how this helps the Commodore 64 or QL owner is far from clear! There is an awful blunder in the mention of the JX80 colour printer (reviewed in October), where the suggestion of changing on a 'bit-by-bit rather than line-by-line basis' is recommended. Even on a line-by-line basis my original dump using this advice took over ten minutes per line and changing colour as suggested would have at least doubled this.

I do not think that the average BBC owner will find much of interest in this book.

The Epson Printer User's Handbook is American in origin. It extends many of the explanations in the printer manuals, and has a section on customising various software packages, including Wordstar, dBASE II, Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony. This may not be of great interest to the average BBC Micro owner, but is very important to small businesses without professional computer support teams.

The remainder of the book is a thorough, though sometimes wordy, amplification of the printer manual. The text is presented in a logical order with chapters covering well-defined areas of interest such as pitch modes, weight modes, formatting output on the page and combining text modes.

There is a good section on bit image graphics, though I cannot imagine typing the 124-line program recommended to produce a simple graph! The authors have restricted their discussion of download characters to a short chapter emphasising the planning stages not well covered in the manual, but have not produced extensive programs involving them.

All programs are in Microsoft Basic (i.e. LPRINT terms), but there is a brief explanation in the preface on how to convert from LPRINT to *FX3 or VDU1.

Don't believe the cover, where it states that this book encompasses printer maintenance - it doesn't. Nor does it mention the JX80 at all.

Overall, a good meaty book and a useful adjunct to the Epson manual.