Sounds like a wonderful idea for a book, doesn't it? One book filled with the answers to all those little problems that you always come across when writing programs. Unfortunately, it's not quite like that.

There are about seventy procedures and functions in this book. Some of them are truly useful - they give you ideas on how to solve trivial problems that are holding up an entire program. None of them are really worth typing in as they stand. There is just too much padding. Most would be more suited as one liners to incorporate in programs, rather than going to all the trouble of a procedure or function.

Some of the programming techniques are downright sloppy - time delays using FOR...NEXT loops? Tut tut.

There are other problems with this book too. The actual program listings are not wonderful. They're rather feint and tatty looking; a great contrast from the clear text and good quality paper. More important is the lack of a useful index. You're not going to read through this book. It is a reference work, and the need for an index is clear. However, all that is provided is an alphabetic list of the procedure/function names along with their applications. Surely an alphabetic list of the applications with the choice of program against each would have been more useful.

It's a nice idea, but I'm not really impressed with the result.