This is yet another third party tutorial on using the world's most popular program (and one which was unfortunately not available to me). One of its most unusual features is that the work sheets used as examples in this book, as in others of its type, are published on disk.

This is highly desirable, because although the complete models are listed at the back of the book, they are in several cases very large with many repetitive sequences, so copying them out would be excessively error-prone, albeit possible.

As models, they are quite good, if a bit unimaginative. On the one hand their very simplicity makes them relatively easy to understand, on the other they don't give much idea of the subtleties of VisiCalc.

The tutorial section of the book doesn't suffer the same fault as it's little more than a paraphrase of the VisiCalc documentation, which is itself particularly good.

Overall, I would suggest that the disk versions of the spreadsheets are rather more useful than the book, though at US $39.95, it could be rather extravagant. Of course, you could type in the listings, but since the authors list them complete, with no attempt to develop some convention for using the /REPLICATE function, this is tedious.

It's a pity that a little more thought wasn't applied to the development of the idea before the authors rushed into manuscript.