GUIDES FOR BEGINNERS

John Gilbert reviews the latest titles on the bookshelf.

Publishers are beginning to realise that there are few general introductory books to computers on the market. Several new titles have been released in the last few months and they have steered clear of introductions to specific machines.

The Pre-computer book by F A Wilson is published by Bernard Babani. The book has an odd title but that is the only strange thing about it. Wilson provides an introduction for the complete beginner. The concept of the computer is examined, together with such diverse subjects as number bases, hardware and simple programming. As a result it covers a great deal in very few pages.

The book will satisfy your curiosity if you want to know what a byte is or where to find the ROM of a machine, but if you are looking for very detailed information, this general guide is not for you and does not pretend to be.

The Pre-computer Book costs £1.95 and is one of the least expensive books which have been reviewed to date.

Another book for the complete beginner is Programming for Real Beginners from Shiva Publishing. The author is Philip Crookall. It is a general introduction to computers and does not stay on the theme of programming. It may be useful to someone who is beginning a course in computer studies and would suit anyone doing CSE or O level. It is available for £2.95.

For people who want to go a few stages further, Century Books thinks that it has provided the definitive text on Sinclair machines with its Century Computer Programming Course. What it has done is to publish a massive tome of text which is not indexed in any way. The book contains some interesting information on both machines but there is no way to find the information quickly. A proper index would, most probably, occupy another 10 pages.

While the expansion into the general sector of the market has been taking place, more Spectrum books have appeared. The state of play seems to be that anyone will do anything for a Spectrum.

The Century Computer Programming Course is written by Peter Morse, Ian Adamson, Ben Anrep and Brian Hancock. It costs £9.95 and is well worth the money.

The recent release of the Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly, by Dr Ian Logan and Dr Frank O'Hara, must be a great relief to many machine code programmers who want to get to grips with the Z-80A processor inside the machine.

The book is published by Melbourne House and gives a detailed breakdown of all the routines in the ROM, including information on I/O routines, arithmetic and floating point calculations and the re-start routines at the beginning of the ROM.

The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly costs £9.95. It is slightly overpriced, although the information is worth having.

A book on machine code, Spectrum Machine Code, has been published by Shiva. The authors are Ian Stewart and Robin Jones and their handling of the subject is excellent, so far as it goes.

The book is very thin, although it provides a great deal of information. The chapters on the display and attribute files of the Spectrum are very interesting and will be of immense value to anyone who wants to use machine code graphics within programs.

Spectrum Machine Code is part of the Shiva Friendly Micro series and costs £5.25.

Advanced Graphics with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum by I O Angell and B J Jones is published by Macmillan Press. The authors are obviously academics, as the book seems to be aimed at those with a great technical understanding of the Spectrum and also a knowledge of Cartesian Co-ordinate geometry. It is written rather like a treatise, with many references to other books in the main text.

It is well-presented and provides plenty of technical information. The authors show how to develop arcade-quality graphics and also go into the realms of three-dimensional animation. The problem is that many Spectrum users would lose their way in the book, not because of any failing on their part but because of the authors' narrative style. Advanced Graphics with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum costs £9.95.

The ZX Spectrum - Your Personal Computer is published by Prentice/Hall International and written by Ian McLean, Simon Rushbrook Williams and Peter Williams.

The first third of it is taken-up by drawings of the Spectrum keyboard with marks showing the relevant key positions. Some readers may regard that as an insult to their intelligence, as all of those key functions are marked clearly on the Spectrum.

There are, however, several redeeming features. The text is clearly set out and the examples are excellent. The chapter on loading and saving programs is useful but merely repeats the one in the Spectrum manual.

It is a useful adjunct to the Spectrum manual and costs £5.95.

Melbourne House (Publishers) Ltd, Glebe Cottage, Glebe House, Station Road, Cheddington, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire LU7 7NA.

Bernard Babani (Publishing) Ltd, The Grampians, Shepherd's Bush Road, London, W6 7NF.

Shiva Publishing Ltd, 4 Church Lane, Nantwich, Cheshire, CW5 5RQ.

Macmillan Press, 4 Little Essex Street, London, WC2R 3LF.

Prentice/Hall International, 66 Wood lane End, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, HP2 4RG.

PAPERDATA

It's easy to feel that the glut of computing books forgo the rudiments of the craft and settle for lots of games for the frogger freak. But, asks Alan Jowett, could it be that the authors of these texts ignore a rather vital question. What is a book?

Anthony Burgess, the Clockwork Orange man, described books in a recent colour supp ad as "boxes of organised knowledge". But too many of the micro volumes sitting in the racks round at the dealers are really collections of old magazine programs, writ large and often writ fast. No worse for being collected, but no better either.

"The first rush of books on the Sinclair machines has been, to put it kindly, disappointing. Certainly none can be considered a serious text on Sinclair Basic. We felt that a book was needed which gave the first time user a worthwhile home tutor on computing," so say the authors of Century's new Computer Programming Course. Perhaps they're right.

Have you or your kids been up at night furrowing over fuzzy repros from a defunct ZX printer... are you wasting your time on books that aren't worth the paper they are printed on? And it's sobering to consider just how many Sinclairs are listed in the 'Swaps and For Sale Cheap' columns because the owners have got fed up with the turgid prose of their books. The majority of the tightly crammed pages are in their way as unreadable as the 60's underground magazines that used to print green ink on purple pages. Indeed, one unmentionable guide went for four pages before introducing a new paragraph! The impression is that many are written by scientists or science teachers 'on the make'.

True fans of everything that Clive Sinclair originally begat will want to invest the full £9.95 on the aforementioned Century Programming Course, a massive 525 pager that takes you right through every nook and cranny of the ZX81 and Spectrum. If you believe that your interest in Sinclair Basic is going to persist for the next few months, let alone years, then probably this is the one. It might have been more logical, however, to have brought in the Spectrum system and keyboard at an earlier stage than page 439 in section W, as if assuming that everybody is progressing from a ZX81 first.

A BETTER MANUAL

There's far less about programming in Ian Sinclair's The ZX Spectrum and how to get the most from it (Granada, £5.95). It's probably the best of the general guides and it seems to aim towards being more readable than the manual that accompanies the machine itself. This Sinclair must have made a mint from those who assume that he has kinship with our great Mensa sage, but I wouldn't begrudge a penny of it. Sinclair Minor actually tries to make a few jokes - nothing actually very funny, but enough to make things more readable and any attempts at whimsy are worthwhile.

Sinclair doesn't make the pedagogic mistake of thinking that lack of knowledge equals lack of intelligence. But he does provide welcome diagrams for newcomers to the art, and a breakdown checklist. Advanced readers of this column may quietly sigh, but they were once beginners, and not that long ago either. The computer clubs are full of people wondering why their Spectrums won't work, and most of the answers will be found here.

Actually, for those truly at the starting gate, for my money the best book to buy is First Steps with your Spectrum - my fave rave for any Sinclair computing course. Authoress Carolyn Hughes ran computer courses at her sons' school. She has provided a manual that sensible dealers could pop in with the Spectrum as a goodwill gesture (it only costs £1.25 from Armada) and one that should have any reader from eight to eighty programming in half an hour.

Tim Hartnell, who has not been slow off the mark in dashing off a few million words of his own, adds in a foreword "There are lots of books written about the Spectrum. They were not written with you in mind."

The point is, were they written with anyone in mind? Apart from the bank manager that is.

Is it beyond the wit of publishers to attract a real writer to investigate the world of programming - and compose a book that is enjoyable to read, to handle and to program from? If you think that Fleet Street journalists spend all their time making up stories and muck-raking, cast an eye at The Sunday Times book on Skiing, mostly written by Harold Evans. Technical material is superbly illustrated and magnificently described and it has the reader almost leaping on the next plane in a mad urge to be out there on the slopes. Hands up all those who've ever had a thrill like that from reading a programming book.