The blurb on the back of the book doesn't auger well for what's inside. "The Spectravideo's 32K RAM is expandable to 256K", it chunters. Actually it isn't - it's expandable to 144K. But this seems to be the only obvious howler.

However, perplexed by the quantity of Ian Sinclair books winging into the office, we compared the chapter headings with another in the series, Memotech Computing. The first few headings run as follows, with the Memotech headings in brackets:

1 Setting up the Spectravideo (Setting up); 2 Becoming a star of the screen (Screen time); 3 Palace of varieties (A bit of variation); 4 Repeating yourself (Repetitions and decisions); 5 Programs with strings attached (Programs with strings attached) - and so on.

There's nothing wrong with using a tried and tested formula, of course, if the formula works. But I really don't think this one does. Almost invariably, Mr. Sinclair spends an inordinate time on telling you how to set up the flavour of the month, then plods through a fairly opaque (for beginners at least!) explanation of printing, variables, subroutines and strings with reference to the machine he's writing about at the time.

The point is that, if it takes nine and a half pages to tell a beginner how to wire up a machine and plug it in, what is the beginner going to make of the following: "The computer converts most of the number it works with into the form of a fraction and a multiplier. The fraction is not a decimal fraction but a special form called a binary fraction, and this conversion is seldom exact."

What Mr. Sinclair is doing here is just banging into something that he knows about, and forgetting that terms like 'binary' and 'multiplier' need explaining.

The book isn't structured enough to be about learning, and although it's overclear in parts, it isn't really clear enough to be an alternative manual.

So we'll have to keep wishing for the Spectravideo Programmer's Reference Guide...

John Lettice