What a pity the publishers of Herbert Honig's second volume of Polishing Your Apple didn't decide to package this book with a disk - it would have made it far more usable. Though there's plenty of solid information inside, it isn't particularly accessible.

The book aims to build on the experience Volume 1 provided. It addresses aspects of programming more concerned with making the basic logic, developed in Vol. 1, into solid reliable programs.

Much of the work is based on a largish program called Money Tool Jr, which performs most of the functions of Mr. Honig's Money Tool, also published by Sams, but as a disk. Money Tool Jr is listed in the back of the book, and really should be typed in before useful work can be done. The same is true of other support programs listed throughout the text.

The main body of the text comprises detailed examinations of each part of various programs. This is the best part of the book as each line and variable is inspected, and all interactions are explored. The only weakness was that Mr. Honig doesn't cover alternatives to the methods he uses.

Money Tool Jr may be a cut-down version, but it's still ten pages long, and has 255 lines, many of which have multiple statements. It even has 15 comments. Generous to an extreme. It's not fair to ask the reader to type that lot in perfectly, before being able to make sense of page 1.

But despite being a demo, Money Tool Jr demonstrates good Applesoft programming, and the techniques shown are worth studying.

This is a case in which stricter editing would have helped by guiding the author into a different order and method of presentation, or publishing the book with a disk.

Richard King