This book is a step-by-step guide to understanding programs and improving your BASIC. Not everyone wants to write their own programs, but once you understand how BASIC works, it is easy to adapt or debug other people's programs and from there it is a short step to writing your own.

At the beginning of the book there is a short guide to the main BASIC commands, with lots of examples to show how they work. The next part of the book shows how the commands are used in programs to do quite complicated things, such as creating a database, making patterns on the screen and sorting data.

The programs are written in "standard" BASIC, that is, a version of BASIC which, with minor alterations, will work on most microcomputers. There is a guide to converting the programs to work on your computer and the conversions for Sinclair computers, which use slightly non-standard BASIC.

Alongside all the programs there are detailed explanations of how they work and of useful techniques and routines which you could use in your own programs. There are lots of ideas, too, for experimenting with the programs and adapting them to carrying out different tasks.