Microdeal
£19.95
Mono/Colour
When the ST first appeared LOGO was included as one
of the programming languages. The accompanying book was for
reference and not a guide for beginners. Granted, many purchasers
would want the high speed graphics of the ST coupled with the ease
of LOGO and may well have used the language before but, on the other
hand, lots of people will have come across LOGO for the first time
and may well have been daunted by the reference book.
This
utility from Microdeal is intended to fill the gap. There is little
difference in reading something from a book or reading it from a
monitor screen, however, in a case like this a screen based tutorial
wins hands down. You will read about the demonstration then see it
displayed right away, no need to sit down and type in the demo
program first, time consuming and boring! I have always been of the
opinion that to demonstrate computer techniques, you have to show
the technique on the computer then let the user list and amend the
program to experiment. Learning by doing is better than learning by
reading.
The disk comes in the usual grey Microdeal two ring binder and is
accompanied by a small (nine page) booklet explaining how to set up the tutorial. It includes a list of all the
lessons and topics, a good idea as you will tend to forget the
chapter and lesson number that you are working with.
The
tutorial is better run on mono, though there is reference to colour
in one of the demonstrations. I normally use a colour monitor and I
found some of the the screens to have a bad choice of colour, making
it very hard to read.
LOGO is a language that I have read about over the years without
taking any interest in it. I decided to have a go when I bought the
ST, but the book soon put me off. This tutorial is, however, very
good, it even lets you type in commands and watch the results,
although you can only type in what you are told to. This stops you
fiddling about and losing the thread of the lesson. If you really
want, you can exit the program and try out the programs with LOGO
itself.
I found the lessons were very easy going, understandable and with
good graphic examples. I got through the first half of the tutorial
in very quick time. You tend to do this because you understand
everything at the time, but you will have trouble remembering things
later. It is really necessary to practise what has been shown to
you, to use and amend the examples provided and to write your own
programs.
This is really aimed at the beginner and is well constructed. I do
not know how you will feel about the price, but I consider it well
worth the money not to have to sit down and type in a lot of
programs! Also, from personal experience, I know how much time is
involved in writing such a (seemingly) short and easy program.
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