This review is being written more than thirty years after buying the book. I purchased this book in September 1977 a month before I took delivery of my TRS-80 Model I Microcomputer. I learned to write programs in BASIC by reading program listings like the ones in this book. I was frustrated at first because the version of Tiny BASIC that came with my TRS-80 did not meet the standards needed to run the programs in this book. Soon, however, I was able to upgrade to Level II BASIC which made it possible for me to enter and run all of the programs in this book.

I learned a lot about my computer's number crunching ability from this book, but nothing about file handling. Most of the BASIC programming books of this era said little if anything about file I/O because of the memory and storage limitations of the first wave of microcomputers. Reading and writing sequential data files to cassette tapes took forever. Reading and writing random access files was impossible with cassette tapes. Floppy disk drives would not become available for my TRS-80 for another year.

Trivia. My first floppy disk drive (single-sided, single-density) cost as much as I had already invested in my Model I computer system. ( )