If you were at the recent Micro User show, then you probably saw copies of Paul Beverley's latest ouvre chained in their hundreds to his wire-frame carousel. To liberate one would have cost you £15.00 at the time: it now costs £17.50 by post. But is this rather expensive book good value for money?

To begin with it is an exceedingly large book - some 400 pages in length, and done out in Computer Concepts green. Though in spite of using CC's house style, the book is a quite independent production of Beverley's 'Norwich Computer Services'.

The book is organised into sixteen chapters with some useful appendices and an excellent index. The last ten chapters (and in fact 300 of the book's 400 pages) deal with various aspects of the Wordwise Plus programming language, so that very little of the book is of relevance to Old-Wordwise users. The fact that so much of the book is devoted to the programming language should not necessarily deter potential readers however, because much of the treatment is applications-orientated with a multitude of program listings of potentially wide interest. But more of this later.

What of Beverley part one? The first six chapters of this book will be extremely useful to any user of Wordwise or Wordwise Plus. The book is not written for the absolute beginner in the manner of the early chapters of Bruce Smith's book on Wordwise (Wordwise Plus - a user's guide, Collins £9.95 reviewed briefly in Beebug Vol. 4 No. 7), but addresses itself to a number of specific topics. In this context Beverley gives very thorough coverage of the interface between word processor and printer: not the interface in a hardware sense, but the way in which Wordwise may be persuaded to print what you want where you want it.

As ever, Beverley writes clearly, and moreover he writes from the point of view of the day-to-day user of Wordwise: not an unreasonable stance since the book itself was written with it. But the consequence of this is that some of the oddities of Wordwise and Wordwise Plus that you may have been wrestling over for months, are explained and overcome. For instance, if you are using a printer, such as the Epson FX80, that cannot normally print on the top line of the paper, the only effective way to use paging is to set up TS as zero, and BS as around 8 or 10.

Or on another point, have you ever had embedded Wordwise printer commands, particularly at the start of a document, ignored by your printer for inexplicable reasons? Beverley has solved it! The answer is that printer commands which have any form of indent command (IN or TI) between them and the next piece of text, are ignored. So if you are indenting, indent first, and send printer commands afterwards.

The book contains a good number of such observations which will, I am sure, save a great deal of teeth grinding and hair tearing; but it also contains much useful specific advice and general information, as befits a handbook of quality.

The second, and major part of the book does not fall so readily into the handbook category as the first. It consists largely of some sixty programs written in the Wordwise Plus programming language. These are grouped under six major headings:

1. Text manipulation 2. Document layout 3. File manipulation 4. Database applications 5. Numbers and numbering 6. Calculations

Of these, the Database applications section is arguably the most useful, containing programs to handle name and address files, label printing and mail-merging.

Every program in this part of the book is accompanied by extensive documentation. And at least part of the function of these programs is to illustrate the use of various techniques in Wordwise Plus programming.

In addition, Beverley provides a small number of short routines specifically intended to be incorporated into larger programs.

However, the fact that so much of the book consists of programs using the Wordwise Plus programming language I regard as something of a disappointment, especially in view of the book's title. I would have liked to see a number of chapters in this part of the book that were technique-orientated tutorials: perhaps a section on screen presentation and the use of VDU codes, one on string handling, one on machine code, one or two on the writing of utilities, and so on.

Beverley does tell us about techniques in his very full treatment of each program presented, and there is clearly a very good case to be made for the lavish use of example programs in a book such as this. But a handbook needs to approach technique more directly for a greater part of its volume than the present work.

This is not to criticise the programs themselves. They cover a very wide range of topics, and there are many useful ones amongst them. Of course, Wordwise Plus is such an appealing language to write in that Beverley has fallen into the inevitable trap of writing some things in the language just for the sake of it, when it would have been much easier to use Basic. But even these programs serve the fundamental purpose of demonstrating the use of the language. So why not write an invoicing program in Wordwise Plus? - even if the triple-precision arithmetic necessary for calculating the VAT results in a much longer and slower program than could have been achieved in Basic: that is not the point!

To be quite fair, not every chapter in part two of the book presents program listings. The programs are sandwiched between two expository chapters: an introduction to the language, and a section on hints and tips for the Wordwise programmer. This latter contains one or two true gems: witness section 16.20 for example which gives some of the major zero page locations used by Wordwise Plus. These can be enormously useful to the programmer. Thus Beverley reveals that &8F contains a status byte of which bit zero tells you whether Wordwise is in Menu or Edit mode.

This is just what you need if you have a program which has to issue commands directly from the Wordwise menu (Wordwise will not execute a command when in edit mode). This question is treated more fully in section 16.15.

The disc of the book is also available at a relativley modest £7.50. It contains some sixty programs which may be selected from a special menu - run of course from Wordwise Plus! A novel feature of the disc is that it offers a second option, which will unpack the files and store them on two new disc surfaces in a one-program-per-file format for easier subsequent retrieval.

All in all, Paul Beverley's glossy green tome will prove to be an extremely useful one for experienced users of Wordwise Plus. Less experienced users will benefit greatly from reading Bruce Smith's book before graduating to Beverley's Gargantuan Guide.