Roy Atherton is perhaps the arch proponent of structured programming languages, and has long been a critic of Basic. BBC Basic is, however, in a different class from 'ordinary' Basics, being endowed with many of the features found in languages like Comal and Pascal.

The theme behind this book is to encourage the processes that precede programming - problem analysis and design. With this aim in mind it is not a book to be taken light-heartedly, rather, it is a very serious book with a lot of very good material in it. There are many worked examples and solved problems. The book uses BBC Basic in the majority of its examples, making it very easy to work through.

I thoroughly recommend this book to those of you who want to take the art of programming seriously; it will teach you the correct way to program.

The book itself, is cleverly structured making it of use to both the beginner (before he picks up bad programming habits) and the experienced programmer who is already practising bad habits. A glance at some of the chapter headings will show you that this is no ordinary book on programming:

1. The Computing Process Logic, Colour and Control
2. Data Representation and Manipulation Procedures, Parameters and Functions
3. Shapes and Procedures Data Structures
4. Decisions and Special Characters The Anatomy of a Program

In conclusion the author gets my greatest admiration for a book that is totally devoid of those dreadful GOTOs. If everyone wrote programs like this the job of understanding and debugging would be vastly easier.