Good grief. It's almost impossible to find *anything* to do with Ataris for under two quid so I approached this with some scepticism.

However, this deceptively slim and unglamorous volume is quite a little mine of information, though it must be dug out fairly laboriously - partly because of the frustrating lack of an index.

Still, mustn't carp too much because the Penfolds have crammed a great deal into the book and even managed to include a few simple games listings and a nifty joystick sketching program in text which is otherwise broken only by a few demonstration routines.

Coming from an electronics-orientated publisher, the amount of technical information is hardly surprising, and for a non-maths person (such as me) its clarity is refreshing. This is best shown in a section on binary and decimal conversion which had previously been a bit of a mystery to me.

Though the book glosses over many of the more attractive Atari features, it is a gem for a price more usually enjoyed by Spectrum users.

Stuart Cooke