This book is nothing like as easy to read as the one by Ian Sinclair. I found many of the descriptions fundamental to the understanding of discs hard to follow, and would suggest that the beginner needs a much clearer approach. This considerably devalues the book for those who use it for learning about their Acorn DFS.

The copyfight on this book is 1983, and it is obvious in several places that the book is not as up to date as Sinclair's. In fact Tony told me he was working on this book in February 1983. The book is also written for the American market with the American spellings of 'color' 'center' 'endeavor' etc.

This book is really aimed at those with the Acorn DFS, and no others are described.

Much of the book is based around three programs given in the book - a disc formatter, verifier, and a word processor. The formatter is rather a waste of space because all suppliers of discs systems for the Beeb now supply a formatting program. Latham spends a fair amount of text explaining how these programs work. These programs are hardly the type of program that the beginner would tackle.

The chapter on file handling is in my view poor, and contains misleading statements like "New Basic requires OPENUP instead of OPENIN." The truth is that Basic II has' both OPENIN and OPENUP, each having a different use, however to maintain compatibility between Basic I and Basic II you should only use OPENUP on machines that have Basic II.

Latham's description of random files in Basic is virtually non-existent and is mostly described using assembly language instructions. This will probably put the beginner off altogether.

For me there is no competition between the books, Sinclair's is far better value for money (and it's £1 cheaper anyway). The main justification for buying Latham's book would be if you were familiar with disc systems but wanted descriptions of the OS statements OSFIND, OSARGS, OSFILE etc, in which case the Advanced User Guide provides much more detail anyway.

I still maintain that there is a need for a complete book devoted to file handling, totally separate from books on disc systems. I await such a book with interest.