The vast majority of Commodore 64 owners will be satisfied with just a 64 and a cassette unit for a while. But when they want to move onto more complicated applications like word processing or serious programming, they must add to this system. Their next two purchases (after the inevitable joystick) are likely to be a disk drive and a printer.

At first sight there doesn't seem to be a whole book's worth of information in these two peripherals, and this is borne out by its brevity - there are only 95 pages of main text.

However, what there is describes the use of the Commodore 1541 disk system in detail, and this takes up the bulk of the book. Following this is a 20-page guide to printers, which devotes most of its attention to the non-Commodore variety. This is quite sensible since the independent printers tend to be more versatile than Commodore's own, even if they can't print the graphics characters. This chapter is one of the best in the book, and lucidly describes the use of Escape codes as well as the principal types of printer available.

The chapters on disk drives include descriptions of the Disk Filing System, general filing system, and discussions of disks etc, but seem to be a little padded out. There should really be room in a whole book to cover more than two peripheral types, which could be dealt with succinctly in about 50 pages.

What justifies this book more than any other feature is the database example, which not only provides the required program, but explains it in depth and gives an indication as to how databases in general can be constructed - an interesting and informative 15 pages.

Half a dozen appendices provide useful information on where to get the products mentioned, as well as general information on random access files and saving machine code as a serial file.

Ultimately, however, the book is too short, and at £6 a bit expensive for the relatively small amount of information provided.

Peter Worlock