SPECTRUM RULES THE WAVES

Every publisher in the UK seems to have discovered the Spectrum, so there is sure to be a bumper crop of reading matter for Spectrum owners in the coming months.

Our review panel have been looking at a selection of the Spectrum books and finds that the standard is uniformly high (both in terms of content and presentation), with each book representing value for money in its own way.

There are four books we'll look at which are collections of programs for the Spectrum.

The first, 'The Cambridge Colour Collection' is by Richard Altwasser, the designer of the Spectrum. The book costs £6.95 and contains just 20 programs. The games include 'Maze', 'Lunar Landing' and 'Android Nim', with more serious programs including 'Home Accounts' and 'Calendar'.

Andrew Hewson (who answers reader's problems in Sinclair User) has '20 Best Programs for the ZX Spectrum' for £7.95. The 'best programs' include 'Machine code editor', 'Index File' and 'Duckshoot'.

Shiva has the cheapest book, the £2.50 'Computer Puzzles for Spectrum and ZX81', from the Stewart/Jones PEEK, POKE team. The many entertaining 'puzzles' include 'The wolf, the goat and the cabbage', 'Queens dominant' and 'The Magic Forest'.

David Harwood (who writes the 'Young Stuff' column in the users' club magazine Interface) has produced 'The Spectrum Software Library - 60 Games and Applications for the ZX Spectrum' for £4.95.

Although the emphasis is on games (including 'Checkers', 'Zap' and 'Galaxy Patrol'), the 'applications' include a 'Renumber' in BASIC and 'Chequebook'.

HUMOUR INVADES THE PUBLISHING MARKET

John Gilbert reviews the latest books including the first for the Spectrum

The mass of ZX-81 books is still increasing. The author of the moment still seems to be Tim Hartnell. His new book for the ZX-81 is Making The Most of Your ZX-81. It will help beginners and contains many programs which can be typed-in immediately.

While the book is good for the complete beginner who has just read the manual, it is not recommended to anyone wanting to learn more about the capabilities of the ZX-81. The text just enlarges on the basic manual and the programs are mostly 1K long.

The book is humorous in places, either deliberately or unintentionally. For instance, one of the first programs is a simple game of Russian Roulette. The screen display is so simple but very amusing.

Making The Most of Your ZX-81, is available from Computer Publications and costs £6.95.

Another new book for the ZX-81 but with a slightly different format is The ZX-81 Add-on Book, by Martin Wren Hilton. It is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is one of the few books written about the hardware side of the ZX-81 market. It describes how extra memory can be added to the ZX-81, taking the Sinclair 16K RAM pack and the Audio Computers 32K RAM as examples.

Backing storage devices are also surveyed, including cassette tape decks and disc drives. Information about optical bar codes and modems is also included. The book explains the operation of the dK'tronics Graphic ROM and the Quicksilva Character Board. It also has a section about the future and the Sinclair miniature television.

The second remarkable thing is that the book is written by a 16-year-old. He has his own computer and writes for an American bi-monthly magazine. The ZX-81 Add-on Book is published by Shiva and costs £5.50.

Shiva has also published a book by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones, Computer Puzzles - For Spectrum and ZX-81.

The authors pose a series of problems, some old, some new, for which they have written programs to demonstrate the problems and to enable the user to try solutions quickly. The programs are interesting but when you solve one of them you have the same feeling you have when you have beaten someone in a game.

Also included is a Spectrum section for those lucky enough to have the machine. The price of the book is £2.50.

The quality of the books being written has improved with the advent of the Spectrum. For instance, Programming your ZX Spectrum is invaluable for people who could not find what they needed to know in the user manuals.

The book expands what is written in the manual and goes further by describing some of the things which have been omitted. It deals with coding of programs and also shows some of the techniques of structuring Basic programs.

The choice of programs has obviously been well thought out and they certainly show the capabilities of the machine.

One criticism is that it explains Basic statements like GOSUB and GOTO in too much detail. Other than that, it is a good book which is recommended for beginners. It is available from Interface and costs £6.95.

Over The Rainbow is a collection of programs in a softback which shows the potential uses of the Spectrum. Programs include games, utility routines and business programs. Some colour insets indicate some of the programs running. The book is from Melbourne House but seems overpriced at £6.95. That is not a criticism levelled only at Melbourne but at the whole computer publishing industry, which seem to trade on the belief that people will buy knowledge at any price.

Computer Publications, Unit 3, 33 Woodthorpe Road, Ashford, Middlesex, TW15 2RP.

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

Interface Publications, 44-46 Earls Court Road, London, W8 6EJ.

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

EXPANDING BOOKSHELF

John Gilbert looks back at the year's books to help enhance the ZX machines.

In the last year scores of books have been written about Sinclair machines and it seems as if anyone who knows anything about the ZX-81 or Spectrum can enter the literary field and become an author.

During the early days of the Sinclair boom, most authors were content to collect together a few programs and write a short piece about each one. That made a book which could be on the streets in the shortest possible time.

One of the main publishers of ZX books is Interface. Its early contributions to the ZX-81 market included Getting Acquainted With Your ZX-81, by Tim Hartnell, and The Gateway Guide to The ZX-81 and ZX-80. by Mark Charlton. Both books are full of listings and very little explanatory text and similar in content.

Hartnell seems to have made a one-man attack on the book market in the last year. His first books were full of listings and contained little text but his latest have dealt more with the techniques of programming and are more helpful to a computer user.

The rationale for books of listings was that they would give people who had just received their machines something to type-in and play with before beginning to program. That reason no longer applies. Magazines such as Sinclair Programs print listings which first-time users can type-in, so there is no longer a need to fill the pages of a book with long listings.

The lesson does not seem to have been learned. Several companies have published books of program listings for the Spectrum. They are well-produced and colourful but ideal only for first-time users or people not interested in programming. The best of them include Computer Puzzles for Spectrum and ZX-81, by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones from Shiva, and Over the Spectrum from Melbourne House. Over the Spectrum is a book of listings but the introductory text to each program is more comprehensive than in other books.

Details are also given about how to adapt techniques used in the programs to the user's programs. The Shiva puzzle book is exceptional. The authors pose problems and give listings which simulate the problems in an effort to solve them.

At some time in the last year authors must have felt that the market for books of listings had reached saturation point. People wanted to learn how to program and several books on programming techniques appeared.

One of the first on techniques was The ZX-81 Pocket Book, by Trevor Toms, published by Phipps Associates. Toms described several ways of saving memory, a much-discussed subject among ZX users. In the book are several programs which use the techniques described and also provide light entertainment when difficulties arise.

Another book on techniques which caught the imagination of users is the Sinclair ZX-81 - Programming for Real Applications, by Randle Hurley, published by Macmillan. It details several software projects, including a word processor and data filing program. Hurley also deals with memory-saving techniques and problems which may be encountered by a user when programming. The author has promised a book on machine code but it has not been published.

Peek, Poke, Byte and RAM, by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones, and published by Shiva, gained fame for providing an easy introduction to programming for the beginner. The book takes nothing for granted about the reader and contains many things which the ZX-81 manual did not embrace.

The author of a technical book faces two problems. The wording must be precise but not fall into jargon. The author must also try to find new areas to explore and not draw on material used in other books. That does not seem to worry many authors but soon the technical market could be saturated with books on the same structured programming techniques and memory-saving devices.

People need to know about those things but there are already many books which explain them adequately. It would be better if authors were to explore other areas and there are many as yet unexplored ones in computing.

The machine code market for Sinclair machines is still very young but what has been published is very good. One of the easiest books about machine code is Machine Language Programming Made Simple for your Sinclair, published by Melbourne House. The book takes an almost child-like stance but proved very readable and excellent value for the beginner.

Mastering Machine Code on your ZX-81, by Toni Baker, is also a good introduction to the subject but slightly more difficult for the beginner to understand.

Machine code can be entered into the Spectrum with greater ease than the ZX-81 and is expected to make people more willing to use it. Once they start doing so they will have greater programming power at their fingertips. The Spectrum is an ideal machine on which to learn and if this sector of the book market is overlooked it would be a pity.

A new market for ZX books has been opened in the electronics field. Two examples are the ZX-81 Add-on Book, by Martin Wren-Hilton, published by Shiva, and 20 Simple Electronic Projects for the ZX-81 and other computers, by Stephen Adams. It shows how to build things like tape recorder controllers, numeric keypads and even a cheap thermometer. The book explains the working of several add-ons at present available from retailers and includes projects which the reader can set up, including a burglar alarm and a voice recognition system.

The book market is becoming as lively as the software market and no doubt many books will be produced for the Spectrum and the ZX-81 in the months to come.

A general criticism of all the books mentioned is that they are all too costly. Paperbacks which would sell for no more than £3 are being offered at £9.

There are two probable reasons for the high prices of many books. Perhaps the market is so small that the prices have to be high to cover the costs. The other reason could be that the publishers know that people will buy a recommended book at almost any price. The satisfactory solution seems to lie between the two.

The book market needs strict controls over price and quality if it is to survive in the computer field. If companies do not start to reduce prices and publish better-quality books, computer users will become more cautious and selective. That has already begun to happen with software and the signs are that it is starting to happen with books.