This claims to be "the Commodore 64 Program Book, with something for everyone... a blockbusting collection".

Well, for the reasonable price of £4.95 this 122-page paperback offers 25 programs to type in. They range from adventure games, 'arcade' games, and a flight simulator: to utilities, an educational Capital Cities quiz and a machine-code assembler/disassembler. The foreword tells us why "we" wrote the book... Since when yo programmers use the royal plural?

The format of each program is sensible: a brief description of what it does, how to use it, line-by-line lists of graphics characters used and what the various routines do (like "fire laser and check for hit") and finally the program itself: dumped directly to a Commodore printer - on balance a wise choice, eliminating the possibility of printer errors though at the expense of some legibility and the use of the Commodore control-code hieroglyphics.

The programs fall into logical batches. First are the two adventure games - Forbidden City and Pharaoh's Curse. Although they take input only in the simple verb/noun format they do have the useful save-game feature for when you have to surrender the family TV set! You can then reload the data when you next come to play and continue from where you left off.

Dedicated Adventurers should be able to solve either adventure in less time than it took to type in - they are by far the largest programs in the book.

(Most) readers will be glad to hear that there is the usual complement of arcade-type games. These include such (original?) gems as Bomber, Breakout, and Lunar Lander. In fairness, they are quite good: colour, sound, sprites and redefined shapes are all used - some games using all four. The sound didn't do the C64 justice, though; it is capable of far more than these programs asked of it. Also,being in Basic, some games were painfully slow.

Another 'game' is Capitals, a very simple "name the city" game that anyone could write within a few weeks of beginning to program. Similarly simple programs were Metric Converter, Cheque Book and Binary to Decimal Converter. A rather disappointing line-renumber program was given - it does not renumber GOTOs or GOSUBs, or thoughts of being spared the laborious task of manual renumbering are dashed!

Anagram is a simple program which jumbles up the letters of words held in DATA statements and prompts the user to guess what the word should be. Instructions for expanding the vocabulary are included, though the data in the program as it stands is large and varied. Obviously parents could add a simpler list of words for young children; or, with suitable vocabulary, it could make an interesting party game.

Morse Code is a useful program which will transmit either a jumble of random letters, a word chosen from its vocabulary at random or a message inputted by the user. I must admit rather liking this program in all its simplicity.

Last, there's a useful utility simply called Machine Code which combines the function of an assembler/disassembler with the useful features of save/load machine code; it also lets you examine memory, run machine code and move memory block. This would have been an excellent program... but for a few (major) faults.

The most important of these is the fact that it does not use standard 6502/6510 mnemonics. Instead the program employs an unwieldy system of the author's own concoction, where the normal three letters (i.e. LDA ADC) must be followed by the letters IM if the operand is immediate (i.e. LDA #$SC), Z if Zero page is to be used and X,Y,ZY or XY if the operation is to be indexed with the X or Y register. And there's more - the program operates in decimal, not hex, so LDA$22,Y would become LDAZY 34!

Anybody who knows 6502/6510 mnemonics will have great difficulty in adapting this system. For those brave enough to do so though, it offers use of (one-letter) labels; and a short sample program is given which shifts the screen one place to the left.

Overall opinion of the book? None of the programs were up to commercial standard - but then at the price you couldn't expect them to be. I think the most accurate description I can give of the programs is 'magazine standard' - that is, less than commercial quality but nevertheless worth having.

Twenty-five programs for less than the price of a normal commercial program is good value; and somebody learning programming could take them apart one by one to reach a good understanding of many Basic concepts.