POOR PRESENTATION HANDICAPS TEACHING AIDS
John Gilbert reviews the latest releases.
The Educational sector of the book market is expanding but the standard is not becoming noticeably higher. Although the psychology of teaching by computer scents to be developing in the proper direction, the standard of presentation in many cases is not good enough. The explanation is that the books on the market are either too difficult or too easy for the beginner to understand.
The Spectrum Starter Packs, numbers one and two, are for the 48K Spectrum. They suffer from being too easy for the age range at which they seem to have been aimed. The packs do not take into account that most children looking at them are growing up in an age of electronics. They do no more than illustrate points in the Spectrum manual and show how the various commands work on the computer.
Both starter packs contain program cassettes which explain how the computer works and provide examples of the Spectrum Basic commands. Most of the information on the cassettes is dealt with in the books accompanying the packs, so the inclusion of such cassettes is superfluous.
The books could be used in primary schools, although they would be of more value, as a talking-point for teachers than an aid which is given to children who are then left to learn programming virtually on their own.
The intentions behind the starter packs seem good but a little more work could have gone into them to improve the presentation. Spectrum Starter Packs, one and two, cost £9.95.
Books on so-called good programming techniques are now forming an important sector of the market. Although most authors fail to inform their readers that there is no best way of programming, the standard of the books is good.
Databases for Fun and Profit, by Nigel Freestone, is one of the good programming books. The author aims to give the reader an understanding of data structures which are used in programming. The book is not machine-specific and should be easily understood by most owners of the ZX-81 and Spectrum.
It starts by introducing the binary and hexadecimal number systems which are associated with computers, particularly with storage and machine code. It then explains how arrays can be used to create a variety of data structures, such as lists, trees and stacks.
When those structures have been explained the author shows how they are used in several types of programs. He shows what is needed to write diary and bank account programs and name and address systems. He also shows how to incorporate arithmetical formulae, such as income tax calculations, into a program to provide some way of processing the data once it is entered.
Databases for Fun and Profit contains much valuable information for anyone wanting to put Sinclair machines to good use. It is published by Granada Publishing and costs £5.95.
Turning from software projects we move to hardware with Simple Interfacing Projects, by Owen Bishop, also published by Granada.
Like the book on databases it is not machine-specific and that makes it different from all the rest. The projects include a real-time clock, a music generator and a ROM board. There are 12 projects which can be built and they are laid out in an easy-to-understand manner. A brief explanation is given of the project and how it works, then the construction details are discussed. As a result the book would be of interest to anyone who has a computer and a basic grounding in electronics. Some experience of programming would also be useful but not essential. Simple Interfacing Projects costs £6.95.
Another book which will be of interest to ZX-81 owners is The Ins and Outs of the Timex TS-1000 and ZX-81, by Don Thomasson. The book looks as if it was written for a readership in the States but it has some relevance in Britain. It explains the hardware of the ZX-81 and includes a complete circuit diagram of the machine.
The author explains how the CPU chip works and gives a detailed account of the pins which feed it with input and output data. A practical knowledge of electronics is necessary for you to follow the discussions in the book and a knowledge of machine code would also be helpful. It is published by Melbourne House and costs £5.95.
A new work from Interface is The Turing Critereon - Machine Intelligent Programs for the 16K ZX-81. The introduction defines computer intelligence as communicating along a wire with something which you are not sure is human or machine.
The problem with the book is that you cannot tell whether it has been written by a human author or a machine, because it is full of listings and not much else.
The book professes to show machine intelligence in action, complete with explanations of how intelligent programs work. Far from doing so the authors have provided a group of listings with information on how to play the games.
The listings are impressive but some of them are lengthy and take hours to enter. It might be better to buy a tape with the listings recorded on it.
Another strange thing is that the book shows how to convert programs from the ZX-80 into ZX-81 programs. Apart from being irrelevant to the subject matter, the idea of typing ZX-80 programs into a ZX-81 seems futile. It costs £5.25.
it is good to see that most publishers are starting to reduce prices as they introduce new titles. All the titles in this month's review cost less than £7. Last year books about Sinclair computers cost anything from £5 to £15.
Many publishers are having to lower prices because of the competition from companies which have just entered the market. As a result the standard should continue to rise and prices should fall.
The first book to deal with the insides of the Spectrum, Spectrum Hardware Manual by Adrian Dickens, must be a welcome addition to any constructor or student of computers, writes Stephen Adams.
It provides an insight on how the computer works and then describes the Spectrum in detail, including complete circuit diagrams of everything, except the ULA.
The user has to be satisfied with a pin-by-pin description of that device. The author describes its workings in simple detail and does not indulge in technical jargon. The circuit principles are explained but not component by component, except where the author is sure of his ground, i.e., the power supply, CPU and RAM chips.
The video section is a little misleading as it refers to B-Y as BLUE-YELLOW, where in real life the Y stands for luminance - the whiteness of the picture. It gives the adjustments necessary to deal with some problems associated with the video.
One-third of the book is circuit diagrams and descriptions of circuits the user can add to the back of the Spectrum. The author seems a little nervous about suggesting that the user make improvements inside the Spectrum. A port made from a PIO, add-on joysticks, plus an exterior keyboard are also described. One suggestion for model one users only is to allow for 127 extra ports by improving on the decoding for the I/O map.
The differences between the models one and two are pointed-out frequently, with photographs to show the components on the circuit board. A "dead cockroach" IC and the transistor across the model two Z-80A CPU are described, along with why they were necessary.
PUBLICATIONS OF VARYING QUALITY AND QUANTITY HAVE GONE ON SALE DURING THE YEAR. JOHN GILBERT LOOKS AT THE GROWING BOOKSHELF AND SELECTS SOME TYPICAL EXAMPLES OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS.
YOUNG AUTHORS GET OPPORTUNITY.
John Gilbert assesses publishing.
The Computer publishing market has developed so quickly this year that publishers have been desperate to lay their hands on anyone who knows something interesting about Sinclair computers, programming techniques, or who has some programs they want to sell.
Some publishers have even asked teenagers to write books because insufficient adult writers have been able to get to grips with the subject. That kind of move sets a precedent in the publishing industry. No other sector has ever sought young writers with such vigour. If you can write and you have an above-average knowledge of computers there is a good chance that a publisher will contract you for at least one book. The problem is, and has always been, that young writers know little about the publishing industry and, through no conscious fault of the signing company or the young author, writers do not obtain everything they should. Fortunately that does not happen often but it is a side-effect of the market growth and the urgency with which publishers seek titles. The youngest writer of the year must be Patrick Bossert, author of the Penguin You Can Do The Cube. In August, Penguin released one of its first micro-computer books by the 14-year-old. Unfortunately Micro Game: was little more than a book of listings, a stage though which many companies such as Shiva Publishing, Interface and Melbourne House passed earlier in the year.
Penguin seems to have relied on Bossert's fame with the Rubik Cube and that the puzzle and computers share the same intellectual image in the public mind. Just because Bossert can do the cube, however, does not make him an automatic genius at computer programming.
The concepts for most of the programs in his book existed earlier in the year when all you could buy in terms of the Spectrum were books of listings. There is little that is new in the title - a pity, since it is from Penguin, a publisher renowned for its quality of output.
Books of listings were popular at the beginning of the year when the ZX-81 had more of the limelight than the Spectrum. Authors such as Tim Hartnell were having at least one book published a month. Most of those books were for the ZX-81, as most publishers had not yet advanced to the Spectrum, although it was launched in April, 1982.
Before the beginning of 1983 the only publishers to try for something extra from the ZX-81 were Interface, Melbourne House and Shiva. All were still small but it is a mark of their innovation which shows their success and expansion to date. Now all three have a large share of the publishing market where Sinclair machines are concerned.
By May all three companies had done something different for the Spectrum market. Machine code programming for the Spectrum was a subject which would sell books and the big three publishers knew it.
Shiva produced Spectrum Machine Code, by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones. It was launched as part of the Friendly Micro series and, although it did not cover the area in as much depth as some of the American books about the Z-80 processor, it provided an excellent grounding in machine and assembly language. It also added a humorous element missing from many other books with 'bug' cartoons spread throughout the pages.
The other publisher renowned for its stock of titles on machine code is Melbourne House. It has two machine code titles which cover the ZX-81 and Spectrum. Both are similar in approach and it seems as if the Spectrum version was edited from that of the ZX-81, with extra examples showing colour and sound added.
The other range of machine code books from Melbourne House is by Dr Ian Logan and, in the case of The Complete ROM Disassembly, written with Dr Frank O'Hara. The books are excellent value and contain a good deal of necessary information for the machine code programmer.
Because of his knowledge of the Spectrum ROM, Logan was asked by Sinclair Research to write the routines for the Microdrive ROM. As a result, and with the blessing of Sinclair Research, he wrote the Spectrum Microdrive Book. It includes much information about the drives, Interface One and the possibility of adding or patching-in extra commands to the Basic.
The emergence of the book resulted in a rash of similar texts from publishers trying to keep in the race for the most up-to-date information. In most cases the follow-up texts represented a rearrangement of the original but, unfortunately, that is not so with the new Microdrive texts from Interface and Sunshine Books.
When first exhibited at the Personal Computer World Show in September, the Interface book was little more than a slim cardboard-bound photocopy. It was planned to use it as the basis for a 'proper' publication. The Sunshine effort, however, was better-presented.
The author of the Sunshine Master Your ZX Microdrive is Andrew Pennel, a friend of Logan. His book contained information which Logan's could not. One reason was that he was not limited by what he could say. Although Logan speaks with an authority which is difficult to match, Pennel's book is slightly better as it contains information which Sinclair Research did not want used in Logan's book.
Even with the restrictions, however, the Logan book is good value so far as money and information are concerned.
The release of the Microdrive texts has introduced a new area to the computer publishing market. We have had books on machines, books of listings, and books showing software techniques but there had, until then, been no books on one specific peripheral for a machine.
The Microdrive seems to have opened an area which could soon include how to get the best from your sound generator or using a disc drive with a Spectrum. Book titles such as that may seem absurd now but with the way books are becoming so machine-dependent, and with the search for new areas to write about, such titles may become available.
The information in the Melbourne House book on the Microdrive contains a good deal of machine code. The publisher is still determined to introduce machine language anywhere it can and the release of another machine code book for the Spectrum was inevitable before too long. The new book is Supercharge Your Spectrum and many pages are occupied by machine code listings. They include routines to search for strings in programs, re-number lines, and delete blocks of lines. It has proved extremely useful to Spectrum owners who know nothing about machine code but who want toolkit routines without having to buy several cassette-based programs.
It is useful in another respect. It is possible for someone just learning about Z-80 machine code to read the program listings and get an insight into how programs are structured and the way in which some statements can work with others. It also provides an incentive to use some of the routines in your own machine code programs.
Not all publishers are interested in machine code and the market has plenty of support from companies with other ideas. Yet another new type of book was launched for the Spectrum by Sunshine. Until the release of Spectrum Adventures, by Roy Carnell and Tony Bridge, computer owners interested in adventure games-playing or writing had to rely solely on magazines.
The new book improved that situation, however, and showed the reader how to write graphics adventures. Little is said about decoding player responses or generating textual adventures but the book still marks a new area for publishers to exploit.
While the areas which belong to the games and utility sector have developed by leaps and bounds, the business and education markets are still nothing more than a mess. Little has been done in book form to aid this ailing though very important part of the industry. There have been a few general books on business applications, such as Databases for Fun and Profit from Granada, but little business-orientated work has been done.
The same is true of the education market, although some publishers, such as Granada and Longmans, are starting to see the potential. The object seems to be to produce as many programmer-orientated books as possible. Unfortunately that leaves the market for the computer user who does not want to be bogged down by technology as undeveloped as it was early in the year.
Several new areas in the publishing industry include machine code programming and programming techniques. They are over-developed and that is proving expensive to the other users who want to use Spectrums at home or at school for accounts or homework.
In the end that can only do the market and, indirectly, computer manufacturers, a good deal of harm. The areas in which computers can be used, such as education and business, will be under-developed. Many children will know how to program but very few will have ideas on how to use those programming talents.
Interface, 44-46 Earls Court Road, London W8 6EJ.
Melbourne House, 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London SE10.
Puffin Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.
Shiva Publishing, 4 Church Lane. Nantwich, Cheshire CW5 5RQ.
Sunshine, 12-13 Little Newport Street, London WC2R 3LD.
Grenada, 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA.
All information in this page is provided by ZXSR instead of ZXDB