Sprite Graphics For The Commodore 64 is an unusual book as it limits itself just to one aspect of the C64. This is an American import but, for once, there is little of the patronising that seems to pervade a lot of American books: the author (about time some publishers started recognising the existence of female competence!) has obviously spent a good deal of time researching sprites. And the resut is a book that will give you a very good knowledge of sprites.

Good presentation too: I particularly like the use of diagrams for explaining tricky subjects. These simplify the subject matter and are crystal clear.

There are also four pages of colour photos showing different sprites from the 25 example prorgrams. A few of these are three or four pages long, with some dauntingly long lists of DATA statements.

One chapter is spent solely on binary notation and boolean operations. But it is done so painlessly that few should have any trouble understandin the concepts.

The last chapter is a question-and-answer guide to problems with sprites. I must confess I knew about the dreaded 'sparkle', but I didn't realise it could trigger collision interrupts. ('Sparkle' is a phenomenon on older C64s where you get little flashes of light randomly appearing on the screen.)

If you really want to know the ins and outs of sprite programming from Basic, this book is for you. Be warned though: it does not go into the real meaty stuff of multiple sprites using raster interrupts, so if you know what that means then you are probably some way beyond the scope of this book. Good value.