QL books aplenty are about to hit the streets. Or at least that's one way I could deal with the mountain cluttering my desk. But at the baack of my mind there's always been the voice of responsibility, telling me first that these are good, honest authors out there, and second that I'd better review a couple before the pile gets any bigger.

Putting them in order of complexity you come to Lionel Fleetwood's Sinclair QL User Guide first. This is one of the better value QL books, as it is mostly for the first time user who wants an explanation of the applications packages. It does a quick overview of SuperBasic in the first forty-odd pages, and for the rest of the distance concentrates on the applications packages that come with the machine.

These later sections aren't bad, but there are cavernous gaps. Say you've just gone down to the shops, bought a QL and Mr. Fleetwood's user guide. Boot up the Quill, type some stuff, then you want to print it out. You tear through the index of the book, which refers you to choose a printer.

Undaunted, you head for the section on Quill, which tells you: "Once you've designed your document with headers and footers, you're ready to print: this you do by (a) making sure you have a printer and (b) hitting F3 P."

With RS232 - pull the other one, Lionel!

A couple of other points might make you doubtful - the cover picture is an enhanced version of an early Sinclair PR shot, complete with non-existent RAMpack, and there's a particularly woeful paragraph on the jacket which refers to 'the technical section on the 68010 processor, the Motorola instruction set and the QDOS Operating System.' None of these things are actually in the book (we reckon the 68010 is a 68000 with a 16-bit data bus) and there's a sticker over the paragraph, or there was. Memo to Sigma - send books to reviewers with bitten fingernails...

John Lettice