The user's guide with applications for the IBM Personal Computer. (book reviews) Susan Glinert-Cole.

The User's Guide with Applications for the IBM Personal Computer, and Techniques of Basic for the IBM Personal Computer

The User's Guide with Applications for the IBM Personal Computer, and Techniques of Basic for the IBM Personal Computer are brought to you by the same folks who did Introduction to Graphics for the IBM Personal Computer and both are pretty dull. The User's Guide has a neat picture of a child holding a calculator and a splendid description of a four function ditto. After seven pages of explanations about the TV Science Fiction Computer and the Spy Movies Computer, interlarded with swell photos of more hand-held calculators, we get the usual fuzzy photo of the IBM PC.

The title of the book doesn't have much to do with the text, which is more of a general exposition on gee-whiz technology and business profundities like: "In businesses. the reduction of the time between goods sold or services performed is known as "reduced float.'' In case you weren't aware of it, "File management can be thought of as the operations performed on any file.' I thought this was supposed to be a user's guide, not a tour through businessland.

In case you are tired of your PC and are already lusting after another computer, there is a chapter devoted to other machines. There are no descriptions of anyone's application software, unless you consider the sentence "The supplier of hardware is often an excellent source of software' a useful line into a spreadsheet. The chapter on system programming is enough to give any system programmer a stitch in the side. The programs are too small and limited; if you are really looking for useful Basic programs to type in, get the TAB book described above. Both of these are by John Grillo and J.D. Robertson for Wm. C. Brown Company.

Review Grade: C