This highly-coloured slim volume comprises 63 pages of extremely simple advice on getting sound out of your BBC or Electron.

After a quick survey of the machines and using Basic, it eventually gets, by page 15, on to mentioning the sound command. To make the text a little more interesting, there are screenshots dotted around. As is becoming the unfortunate norm these days they disappointingly have no programs related to them. They are rather nice pictures and it would have been nice to have seen how they were done.

The book also appears to have been printed using a dot matrix printer. None of your NLQ stuff this, its straight 8 by 8 matrix.

Anyhow, back to the book; a few chapters on, we still have not learned much. This leads me to believe that the book is aimed at younger readers or perhaps beginners, either of whom will probably be bored stiff by the time they are halfway through.

One thing conspicuous by its absence is any reference at all to the ENVELOPE command. This is somewhat strange since it turns the BBC and Electron's simple SOUND command into something special. There is also no mention of such subtleties of the SOUND command as synchronising the channels or interrupting on-going sounds. The author either hasn't read the User Guide or thinks that such things are far beyond your average BBC/Electron user. I doubt whether he's correct.

Kenn Garroch