Two For Tease

Both these books are aimed squarely at the people who like to practise their programming talents by using a micro to attack a problem. Victor Bryant's book consists of a mixture of original puzzles and Brainteasers selected from The Sunday Times and the New Scientist.

His selection is a good and varied one and the explanations he offers before showing you how he writes the programs are both easy to follow and explicit.

Garry Marshall's offering is much more of a mish-mash, being a collection of extended articles from his regular column in The Observer Colour Supplement.

Unfortunately, his style is over-ponderous even when putting the simplest of points across to the reader.

Many of his programs are peculiarly machine-specific (are there *really* any TI owners out there?) without warning the reader which machine each program is for, and he is one of those programmers who can't be bothered to renumber the program lines so that listings appear number 10, 12, 13, 16, 20, 35, 40, etc.

This is hardly a good example to set for the (obviously) relatively inexperienced market he is aiming at.

Simon Dally