This book consists of a series of hints and tips for users of Wordwise, and an accompanying disc of programs is available. The quality of the tips is variable - there are a couple of gems but most are not very useful, even to the novice 'Wordwiser'. The style is friendly rather than academic, but still long-winded.

One or two bits are very helpful. There are excellent diagrams explaining the page layouts of Wordwise, and you'll find some good advice in the introductory chapters, although they are difficult to read.

A number of Basic and assembler programs are included, which are useful and well written. In particular the routines for the Brother HR1 daisywheel printer (e.g. underline) would be invaluable to anybody using an HR1 with or without Wordwise. The Wordwise multi-copy print routine works well.

Unfortunately many of the techniques presented either do nothing useful or are inefficient ways of tackling the problems. I doubt that many people will find Wordwise particularly useful for 'knitting patterns' or 'database applications'! Many of the Basic routines only work in Basic 2, but simple changes would have enabled them to work in both versions of the language.

The appendices are mostly good, especially the table of *KEY codes, and there are notes from Computer Concepts explaining the differences in the latest version of Wordwise 1.20.

Overall, I was disappointed, and could not recommend this book except for the HR1 printer routines and some of the initial explanations. The content is really at the level of a magazine article rather than a published book, and with only 52 pages of quite large text it's not very long anyway. If you've upgraded to Wordwise Plus then many of the tips in this book are not at all applicable.