More a collection of magazine articles than a text book, the aim and claim of the 'Screen Shot' series is step-by-step programming. Arranged in sequence, the articles go from absolute beginners right through to writing a simple arcade game.

There books are superbly produced, and full of lovely colour. A novel feature is to use photographs of the monitor screen to illustrate examples and show listings - hence the 'Screen Shot' logo. But I found the listings difficult to key in. At five lines to the centimetre, the characters are very small and it's not easy to keep a straight edge in place.

Book 1 has the best introduction to Sprites and Sound that I have yet seen, complete with a useful selection of sound routines - engines, lasers, birds and more, otherwise, it adds little to the manual that comes with your computer. Unfortunately the demonstration programs are unimaginative and show.

The use of ';', CHR$ and even LET (on a Commodore!) makes mountains out of several molehills - a hangover, presumably, of this being one of a collection of such series for various computers.

Book 2 is mainly, but not only, about graphics: including bitmap graphics, drawing and filling shapes and more about sprites - both multi-coloured and animated. All this leads up to the usual task of writing a short arcade game. The game works but, written in simple Basic, it won't make a fortune for you in the arcades or software shops. A lot of useful stuff here but to follow the text, photographic listings and Mr. Cornes' individual style of programming takes plenty of patience.

Two books so far, and there are still two more to come - topics, as yet, unspecified. At £5.95 for each of these 64 page offerings, this is an expensive, and not always easy, way of collecting some good information and ideas.

The conclusion? Lovely to look at, but, at the price (£5.95), not very good value.