THERE ARE MOVES TOWARDS TECHNICAL END OF MARKET

John Gilbert reviews a new development in publishing but discovers there is still a great deal of room for improvement.

We forecast two months ago that books about computers would become more technical towards the end of the year. That has happened but a large gap is still left in that part of the market.

Ian Sinclair's new book, Inside Your Computer, is an example. It provides a general introduction to what a computer is made of and how it functions but offers little new information, the author was accurate to describe it as being aimed at beginners, because it could not be recommended to anyone who has had a computer for more than six months and has read any computer magazines.

Although it is a simplistic introduction there is little wrong with what it preaches. Sinclair has taken a diverse set of subjects and put some structure into them. The result is a clear definition of both the hardware and software of a machine.

The author refers to specific machines several times but that is not often sufficient. The ZX-81 and Spectrum are dragged into the explanations twice but some of Sinclair's descriptions are difficult to understand because one cannot visualise the machine he is explaining. The book compensates for that deficiency to some degree, however, with photographs and diagrams. For a technical book for the beginner there are too few illustrations, although those which are included provide some degree of expansion and enlightenment on the text.

On the whole the book is disappointing, because from the taster on the back and the picture on the front the reader could be led to expect more. It can be recommended to the complete beginner who has just bought a computer or to someone who has no computer but wishes to know how one works. The book is published by Granada Publishing and costs £4.95.

First Steps With Your Spectrum, by Carolyn Hughes, is another book for beginners dealing only with software. It is published by Armada, a company which specialises in children's products and a first attempt at breaking into the computer field has worked. The book contains a satisfactory combination of text and illustrations. Unlike many other publications which bunch straight into an explanation of a computer language and how to use it, the author takes time to explain what a computer can do and why it would be useful.

Written in a style anyone should understand the book would be equally useful to an adult who knows nothing about computers but wants to learn.

The author has included several programs designed specially with beginners in mind. Some of them, such as the fruit machine, are predictable but others, such as Elephant, where you have to build an elephant, and Morse Mole, where you have to find a bleeping rodent, are brilliantly simple and perfect for beginners.

Well worth recommending, it can be obtained from Armada Original Publishing and costs £1.25.

Spectrum Adventures, by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell, is a sight for sore eyes and it also fills a very important gap in the computer book market. It fulfills two functions. First it provides a guide to playing adventure games. It gives a general history of adventure gaming and provides details of some of the major adventure games available on the Spectrum, including The Hobbit and the adventures A, B, C and D from Artic Computing. That part of the book provides some good tips for the old and new adventurer alike, without revealing too much.

The second function is to show how an adventure game is written. The example, The Eye of the Star Warrior, was written by Carnell, who also wrote the Black Crystal and, like its counterpart, it is a graphics adventure.

The book provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in dungeons and dragons. Its authors have made the book interesting and exciting and have provided a complete text book for that aspect of software. It can be obtained from Sunshine Publications for £5.95.

Just as esoteric but much more complicated is Z-80 Machine Code for Humans by Alan Tootill and David Barrow. The title is unfortunate as the book seems to be a regurgitation of others which follow the same lines. It provides concrete examples of what can be done when you and not the Basic operating system control the microprocessor.

The unfortunate aspect is that it is difficult to tell whether it is a machine code trainer or if it is a book for programmers who know how to use the language but do not know what to do with it.

There are several machine code routines in the book, including printing a string of text on the screen all the way up to drawing high-resolution lines.

The book is not machine-specific but most of the routines should work on the Spectrum and some of them on the ZX-81. Any reader, however, should make some allowance for the fact that Sinclair machines use a Z-80A processor and not the Z-80. In most cases there is little difference but you should be careful to check.

Granda Publishing, PO Box 9, Frogmore, St Albans, Herftordshire, AL2 2NF.

Armada By Fontana Books, 8 Grafton Street, London, W1X 3LA.

Puffin Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.

Sunshine Publishing, 12-13 Little Newport Street, London WC2R 3LD.

First Step With Your Spectrum by Carolyn Hughes is a 125 page reader aimed at getting new Spectrum users, particularly the young, through those first few difficult hours when everything is so tremendously complicated, to an understanding of programming technique and a familiarity with the computer. The book achieves its aims by being aware of the readers' problems, assuming nothing and most importantly being fun.

From a brief chat on what computers do, the text continues to make sure that everything goes in the right place when the unit is assembled, to vivid descriptions of the use of Spectrum BASIC, to finally some simple but worthwhile games. Each topic is clearly and cleverly illustrated using wherever possible pictures instead of words, the effect being to make each point enjoyable and more memorable.

Suitable for kids of any age, First Steps With Your Spectrum is written by Carolyn Hughes, published by Armada and costs £1.25.

ISBN 0 00 692240 6

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.