★ LITTÉRATURE ★ ENGLISH ★ GETTING STARTED WITH THE AMSTRAD PCW 8256/8512|8000 Plus) ★ |
| Getting Started With The Amstrad PCW 8256/8512 | Littérature English |
s.Might I suggest a little competition, to be hetd some time later in the year because it's bound to get more interesting. It's simply to guess how many 'Getting started...' with LocoScript books there are, I hate to think. By now I expect LocoScript has more books devoted to it than WordStar does, amazing if you consider that many pirated copies of Wordstar there are, all without manuals. Susan Rogers follows the standard practice of dividing her book up into little sections, dealing with getting started, copying discs, loading LocoScript, editing text and so on and so on. Perhaps the most notable difference between this book and so many of the others is trouble she has taken to keep the readers minds pure from computing terms and concepts. This is a book about word processing - that's all. In fact so hard has the author tried to spare the reader from anything technical that there are some pretty awful gaffes which are far from helpful to anyone who strays from the blinkered life of LocoScript, Utilities are not names, but code words. Likewise she explains that every disc should be formatted before files are copied onto it - we all know that DISCKIT can format while copying so saving a little time and effort. Each section of the book is a mini-tutorial. The reader is given a task to perform and then gently led though its completion. A nice technique for a while, if a little boring later. The style is easy going and should provide easily digestible information for the reader. I am only concerned that the subject area is so limited, so that after digesting the information you will be left with the feeling something like that on leaving a Chinese restaurant - it was nice at the time, perhaps a little overpriced and I'm hungry again. No index, but among the book's 168 pages of well spaced, large type, you will find a useful 'Crib Section' listing the sequence of events necessary to perform 'mundane file copying, formatting etc. Also listed are all of the command letters and key functions, as well as a glossary of computing terms which is perhaps more reassuring than it is useful. 8000PLUS
|
