The Programmers' Troubleshooting Guide For BBC And Electron by Piers Letcher, published by Century, price £7.95 is a "versioned" book, available in similar form for various machines. Although the author claims that problems particular to writing software in BBC BASIC are dealt with, the text doesn't really bear him out.

Indeed the book rather strays from the area indicated by the title and becomes yet another rewrite of the User Guide, a general introduction taking the reader nowhere special. There are certainly a number of peculiarities about programming in BBC BASIC and lots of interesting facts about the implementation of the language, but they are not in this book. They are to be found in numerous specialist magazine articles every month.

The enthusiast will learn nothing from this book and the beginner will regret buying it when he compares it to some older but better introductions.

Peter Mujtaba