Once you've read and inwardly digested Starting Basic, you might just about be ready for the sterner stuff of Caines and Graphics. It's a mouthful of a title - it only just fits on the spine, in fact - but then the book itself is no featherweight.
Starting with the assumption that you already know the rudiments of BASIC, the book immediately gets to grips with structured programming and Boolean algebra. This is no lightning tour, mind you - the pace is on the brisk side, but the treatment is thorough and to the point. If you've never understood AND, OR and XOR, this book could just be what you need. It's got six pages on these alone. Subsequent chapters are no less thorough. Inks and colours are explained about as clearly as they can be, though with some rather bafflingacronyms LCMNs and AINs could get you confused if you're not careful. As for the essentials of character definition and animation, these too are nicely handled. At the technical end of things, a little more depth would have been welcome on topics such as frame flyback - especially given the animation bias of the book. Interrupts are given a much-needed chapter of their own. As with all the aspects of programming handled in the book, considerable effort goes into showing how the interrupt commands can be used to good effect in games programming. Whereas volume envelopes and user-defined characters are obvious at least in terms of their applications, interrupts are far more abstract. As such, they need to have their potential applications stressed above all else. Unfortunately the subject is approached from the wrong direction here - first you have the solution, and only then the problem. This assumes a sizable amount of interest in BASIC for its own sake. You have to want to know what an interrupt is more than you want to know what it does. If all this sounds like hard work, well - it is, in places. The clarity of explanation is certainly praiseworthy, but the subject matter can still make the going heavy. A valuable aid to understanding the book, then, is the example program Stranded. This is an arcade game, written entirely in BASIC, which is constructed during the course of the book. The idea is simple but effective - the theory of each chapter is put into practice at the end of that chapter, in the form of the next game section.
The main thing the book has to offer, however, is not this game or indeed the ability to write games. The truth is, even with Arnold's powerful dialect, BASIC isn't much use as an arcade game language. The strength of the book is the learning opportunity it affords. If you work your way through this lot you'll end up with a pretty thorough understanding of BASIC as a whole - with a rather unfortunate gap when it comes to string handling, it must be admitted. You'll also be able to structure your programs, and handle trigonometry to O-level I shouldn't
wonder. A good solid book, then, with a largely practical approach. It'll take some work, though - it's not really a book for the fainthearted. AMSTRAD ACTION |
