Here is a book devoted to elementary Dragon programming and as such it succeeds - more or less. The text is wordy, but at least this avoids ambiguity. There are 25 chapters, the index is comprehensive, but the chapter on peek and poke could have been far more comprehensive: no useful ROM calls are listed and the chapter (which includes the sum total of information on machine code) only runs to 14 pages.

The book's detail is tremendous, but overwhelming. It takes the authors so long to spell out what they're trying to say that all too often you lose track of what the topic is. There are too many throwaway lines like the one towards the end of the chapter on arrays: "You should be able to see that this makes any searching or accessing easy since it can all be done by indexing". True, but indexing is not explained, and only seven are alloted to arrays which, we are told: "are such useful programming tools".

Training Your Dragon is an overpriced, overdetailed introduction to extended Microsoft Basic and you'd do better to spent £7.95 on more concise texts.

Bryan Skinner