★ LITTÉRATURE ★ ENGLISH ★ THE AMAZING AMSTRAD OMNIBUS|Amtix) ★ |
| The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus | Littérature English |
Tim Hartnell is reputed to own a gold plated ZX-81. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he did, after all back in the early days he was the chap who almost single handed, filled the huge demand for home computing books. I always remember being disappointed when I had typed in one of his wretched listings, only to find that it wouldn't work. It wasn't always my fault either, I learnt more about BASIC by having to correct his programs than I could ever have done from a standard textbook. Well Tim has moved on now and instead of writing the books he has turned to publishing them. The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus (£7.95 Interface) is one of his latest offerings.What author Martin Fairbanks has attempted to do is to put together a series of subjects which he hopes will interest the novice Amstrad user. I say novice because the book is quite clearly set at an easy level, though some of the subject areas are of general interest as well. The book is divided into nine sections, the largest single being devoted to artificial intelligence which takes up 135 of the book's 415 pages. Other subjects include creating adventure games, structured programming, the Amstrad disk system and Logo. All the sections have a large number of type-in listings. The vast majority of them are worth the trouble, especially if you are keen to learn how the programs work. A great deal of attention seems to have been given to the structure of the programs so it is quite easy to work through them. In many ways this is one of the book's strongest points, and it deals with a wide range of computer orientated subjects giving detailed example programs, which aids a deeper understanding of the topic in articular, and computers in general. I was particularly taken by the section on artificial intelligence. You have probably heard about the self teaching TIC-TAC program, well now you can type it in and learn how it works. An ideal way of learning some of the basic principles of Al. Later the section introduces topics that previously I would have crossed the road to avoid — search trees, expert systems, machine translation and selflearning systems. All good stuff. The least useful section is that dealing with the disk system. Apart from the interesting potted history on the creation of CP/M it's about as informative as the Amstrad manual. I am impressed with this book. The author managed to keep the writing light and enjoyable; throughout there are little pockets of wisdom which are delightful. Very worthwhile. Thank you Martin, and much better Tim.
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