Books of programs are still the most common and most popular buy. This one starts out with better aspirations than most, and aims to help you program and understand programming, as well as giving you 50 routines to try your hand at.

Some of the programs, however, turn out to be the sort best left on the shelf. Their usefulness is as a learning aid for they seem to perform otherwise quite useless tasks - why have a quiz to see if you can remember the 128 PEEK and POKE codes on the C64 when there's a perfectly good table of them on pages 132-134 of the user manual?

As with many books of this type, it looks like it has been set on a daisywheel, and the programs have been spooled out to a dot matrix printer. It may lend a certain authenticity to the work, but it's not so easy to read. The tacky chapter headings (Play it again, Sam and Kids' stuff: not necessarily stuff for kids!) don't help either. Fortunately, delving deeper reveals some useful programs, including an effective disk or cassette based cardbox system.

As a programming primer this is one way to approach the subject (and get results), but it's not a book of programs that might save you the cost of a piece of software.

PL