For a book with 224 pages, this volume has little original content.

The first section of the book rehashes the contents of the Acorn disk manual, with lots of nice waffle to fill it out. There is no mention of some of the more advanced features available to the system using the OSWORD &7F or OSARGS calls.

There is also very little in the way of example programs and utilities that one would expect from a book that purports to be about disk programming techniques.

All the details are really only relevant to the Acorn system, although there is a chapter on alternative DFSs, Amcom and Watford only (two pages each).

Eventually, the book gets around to giving some examples, called case studies. These are: a telephone directory listing, a file-patching program, a procedure library program (without the procedures), a simple database, a disk soak test, and a fairly simple file recovery program.

The best thing in the book was the way in which these examples are documented. The style is very Pascal-ish with all the variables stated at the beginning, and the rest of the program written in procedure and function blocks. Each one of these is described in detail and the whole program is listed at the end to allow it to be typed in - if you can work up that much enthusiasm.

Overall, the layout of the book is not particularly appealing, and appears to have been printed on a daisywheel. Whether this is to make the book look more 'computery' or is just cheaper to produce is anybody's guess. The few illustrations are generally very simple block diagrams with lots of white space around them.

If you have bought a disk drive for the BBC then the manual that will come with it, and the abundance of articles on the subject, will be more useful and informative than this amazing piece of tripe.

Kenn Garroch