It says a lot for the advances in both communications hardware and applications, and the dominant position of the IBM PC in the US, that thick, substantial books can be written on the subject.

This is a competently written, meaty treatise on communications - the IBM PC tag is important, but much of the information would be equally valuable to anyone who wants to learn about communications and not necessarily do it on a PC.

The first few chapters concentrate on communications in a general sense - codes, interfaces, hardware. After this, the book gets specific and covers communications software, local area networking and applications for the PC.

One interesting section is "Answers to frequently asked questions" - whether this, coming at the end as it does, was a quick exercise in padding for the benefit of the publisher is unsure, but I like it anyway.

The appendices should ensure the book stays useful as reference material - such goodies as a table of the ASCII characters complete with hex values, and another for Baudot code should prove useful. Also included is a Basic communications program which will enable the PC user to transfer data from an IBM PC keyboard to a communications link and send received data to the screen, printer and disk drive.

Ian Scales