Get your hands on the definitive BBC BASIC reference
Posted by Steve Revill Sat, 04 Nov 2017 11:17:00 GMT
Launched at the London 2017 show, ROOL are now shipping from stock a fully revised edition of the BBC BASIC Reference Manual for anybody who wasn’t able to make it there in person.
Bang up to date
We’ve carefully scoured the change logs since the previous issue hit the presses, back when Barcelona was hosting the Olympics, to fully update all 520 pages in this book.
It even includes details of the very latest variant, BASICVFP, which harnesses some of the power of the Vector Floating Point unit in more recent ARM processors to chew through floating point calculations at unprecedented speeds.
There are corrections to various mistakes in the original text as well as improvements to the organisation of the book and example programs. In particular, the graphics system is now considerably more advanced than it was on the Archimedes, so all the new features needed filling in.
Adjusting for 25 years’ of inflation it’s also cheaper now at £25.00 (plus delivery, cost depends on destination). Being the same size as the DDE box set and Style Guide books they’ll sit perfectly side by side in your collection.
Another one crossed off the list
Documentation is one area that hasn’t managed to keep up with recent advances in RISC OS itself, and this represents ROOL’s ongoing efforts to bring things back up to date. The money from book sales is an indicator of whether other long out of print titles are viable (or not) to revisit.
If you like what you see, then why not get involved? The RISC OS 5 User Guide needs volunteers to help write content and proof read the chapters before we can produce the next stable release of the OS.
Getting your copy
Order online now from the ROOL store. Anyone who’s taken up the RISCOS.fr back to BASIC challenge with a BASIC developer number which starts with ‘BAS07’ can purchase the books with an exclusive 10% discount by quoting their developer number in the notes field during PayPal checkout, the difference will be refunded just before despatch.
It also appears on Amazon, though please note the developer discount cannot be applied when purchasing through this channel.
Congratulations!
Updating the Basic reference guide must have been a huge task after all these years.
Good Work.