A title like The Complete Commodore 64 is a bold one. The C64 has a large repertoire of facilities and to try to include them all between two covers is a mammoth task. Granada have published many books on the C64 by various authors, and have now combined several edited version into one weighty tome - just in time to capture the Christmas market.

The book is divided into six major parts, each one dealing with a particular subject. The first part is by Ian Sinclair from his book Commodore 64 Computing. I reviewed this particular work in the October 1983 issue. I refer you to it for a detailed dissertation.

The 105 pages on Graphics And Sound is by Steve Money from his book of the same name. It describes character graphics, standard and programmable, including a PRINT AT simulation. High resolution graphics is clearly explained and a short machine code routine to clear the hi-res screen is provided.

The next part is about games, and is mainly from the Commodore 64 Games Book by the Bishops. I reviewed this in the February issue and my comments still apply. The games require a lot of work for little result. A few educational games have been included for good measure. I would prefer to have seen this section cut down in favour of a larger section on graphics and sound.

The editor of this compilation is Allan Scott. He and A Bradbury have written a book on adventures for the C64 and 40 pages of it are included. It is well written and entertaining, describing the origin of adventures and some of the techniques used when writing them. Short programming examples are provided and useful text 'crunching' routines are explained. I learned more from these 40 pages than a whole book on the subject from various other authors.

Part 5, Extending your Commodore 64, again by Allan Scott deals with joysticks, cartridges, other languages, disk drives, printers, speech synthesisers, light pens, monitors, modems and networks.

The final section is by Ian Sinclair but this time on the subject of machine code. He offers a sound introduction and does not claim to cover all aspects. Assemblers and monitors are described with particular emphasis on Supersoft's MIKRO 64 assembler package.

Several appendices offer lists of available software and suppliers, Hex to decimal converter, the 6502 instruction set and other odd fragments of information.

For £9.95 you get about five books rolled into one, although somewhat abbreviated. Each one normally retails for between £6 and £7. It is excellent value for money and gives you the opportunity to sample the merits of several authors.