Lon Poole

The 40 programs in this book fall into four categories: (1) Financial, (2) Management Decision, (3) Statistics, and (4) Mathematics and Science. Most of the programs came from an earlier book by Poole & Borchers, Some Common BASIC Programs (1977).

What is different about the programs in this book? They were written to be compatible with as many dialects of the BASIC programming language as possible, including: Applesoft BASIC, Atari BASIC, Commodore BASIC, CBASIC, Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) BASIC Plus, Radio Shack TRS-80 BASIC, Texas Instruments BASIC, and Wang Laboratories BASIC.

There is a good write-up accompanying each of the programs, along with helpful references, to give readers a solid foundation in the subject matter addressed by each program. There are also practice problems and answers that will push readers beyond understanding toward mastery of programming skills.

The chief weakness of the programs in this book is their narrow focus on number crunching. There are no data files to work with. Therefore, the reader will not gain any experience with file I/O from the examples in this book.… (mais)

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.… (mais)

The programs in this book (1982) are Pascal versions of BASIC programs originally published in Some Common BASIC Programs (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1977) by Lon Poole and Mary Borchers.

These programs have to be manually entered at the computer's keyboard before they can be run. The reader of the book must understand the subject matter of the programs in order to benefit from them. This book shows by example the wide range of subjects that lend themselves to computerization. The programs in the book were written and tested on UCSD Pascal with only six digits of precision for real numbers.… (mais)