Hedging his bets, Brian Lloyd has produced a 'beginners' book for the compatible C16/Plus 4 machines, probably the first one on the market. It kicks off with the usual 'getting started' section that's covered perfectly adequately in the user manual.

From thereon, it's down to business, with the next three chapters devoted to showing you how to write your first program, complete with various loops, GOTOs and GOSUBs - pretty good going for a first-timer. By the middle of the book, you're dealing with the Commodore 16's extended Basic commands. Each one is deal with separately, explained and illustrated with example programs. Since most of these deal with graphics, that topic gets a chapter to itself and a drawing utility called Artist.

For the more advanced, there's a chapter on machine-code that introduces the built-in Tedmon monitor, followed by a section on using the 1541 and 1542 (will it ever appear?) disk drives, disk and file-handling commands. The book is rounded off by the usual appendices, giving a list of Basic words, abbreviations, ASCII codes and the like.