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Preface

This is our second book on programming for the BBC Microcomputer and we see it as a natural extension of the first BASIC Programming on the BBC Microcomputer. That first book was published in the Spring of 1982 and gave a comprehensive introduction to BASIC. In this present book, we show how to capitalise on the superb colour and graphics features, which have made the BBC Microcomputer so widely acclaimed!
We genuinely believe that the BBC Microcomputer has something very special and important to offer to everyone! We wrote it so that it could be used at any of three levels, for the hobbyist and the professional alike.
At the simplest level, you may just want to scan through to see what can be achieved with colour graphics on the BBC Microcomputer. When you spot an illustration of a screen display that appeals to you, you merely type in the listing, run it and sit back to enjoy the display!
At the next level you may want to produce pictures, shapes, graphs, histograms, pie charts, etc. to display your own data. We have arranged for you to achieve very professional-looking results quite easily. You merely find a screen display that looks suitable and use its listing. Sometimes you can feed in your own data directly, but where you have to edit the listing, we explain how to do it.
The third level is for those who want to learn how to program graphics on the BBC Microcomputer. if you already have some idea of BASIC programming, you will find that the book takes you gently through the various graphics statements, showing when and how to use them,
With this book, it really is possible to achieve professional-looking and dramatic displays of your own design, quickly and easily. This is largely because we have provided routines which you can call on to take care of the rather mundane and irksome parts of programming graphics, such as set ting up and scaling the displays. We explain how to use these routines and we list them fully in an appendix. Another appendix explains how they work and the techniques on which they rely.
These routines are atso available, with the other programs in the book, for purchase on cassette tape. Not only does this free you from having to type them into the computer; it also means no typing errors. So it is a major advantage.
With this book, we welcome Andrew Cryer to the family team. His contribution to programming has been invaluable and we have appreciated his support and constructive criticism on other aspects of the writing.
We would like to thank those people whose names do not appear on the front cover but who contributed significantly to the production of this book. In particular Tony Brain of Chelsea College and Roger Wilson of Acorn Computers Ltd both made exceptionally valuable comments on early drafts of the manuscript. Our editor, Giles Wright of Prentice Hall International has been a constant source of support, encouragement and efficiency throughout the entire writing process. We are also grateful to Wendy Cryer for her drawings of the 'professor'. The self-study aspects of the, book have benefited much from the association of one of us (Pat Cryer) with the education branch of a multi-national computing concern and with the Institute of Educational Development at the University of Surrey.


Neil Cryer Pat Cryer

Andrew Cryer

London
September 1983

Graphics on the

BBC

Microcomputer


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