Getting the Most from Your Sinclair Spectrum

Personal Computer News

John Lettice

'Getting the Most from Your Sinclair Spectrum', by Anne Sparrowhawk, published by Penguin at £4.95 (paperback, 118 pages). With the number of introduction to computer books there is around, it's surely high time we had an MSX-style standard for them, allowing beginners upwards compatibility? Seriously though, they're not all the same, and this one is commendably different, although you wouldn't think so from the first two chapters, which are the standard 'what do you with a micro anyway' and 'now you've got it why don't you open it and plug it in' introductions. Surely it's about time authors dispensed with this kind of padding? But after that it really becomes quite interesting, launching into a complicated but accessible flowchart illustration dealing with the processes necessary to start up a car. Once you've related that to how you use flowcharts in programming, Ms Sparrowhawk delves into the innards of the machine, showing you how the information is actually stored. It's highly unusual for an introduction to computing to do this so early, but the illustrations are well thought out, and I'd say this approach was more successful than the usual parrot-style method of instruction. However, the book does go off the boil a little towards the end, presenting brief guides to peripherals - surely better in a separate volume, bought after the beginner has come to grips with the machine - and a relatively useless chapter on troubleshooting - perhaps the most difficult area of using a computer. But there is one last bonus - the appendix presents a particularly clear and detailed explanation of the machine's commands. These are listed in sections depending on their function, and I'm inclined to think they'd have been better organised in alphabetical order, but they're still very useful.