What can be said about an individual chapter of a book, especially a chapter from a book where the chapters are written by different authors? The chapter under review is intended to be an introduction to assemblers, interpreters, compilers, and operating systems for someone in the medical professions interested in using a computer in his or her work. However, there is nothing in this particular chapter that requires or utilizes that medical background. The proper basis for comparison is that of other books and papers for the computer novice. On this basis I would have to give this chapter only a B− or a C+. The writing is adequate, but little more. There are no elegant analogies that help relate unfamiliar concepts to those better understood. There are some overgeneralizations that I might quibble with, but then I could make similar quibbles over much of the popular computing literature. The only serious misstatement is that “Pascal was developed by Nicklaus Wirth and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego.”

The real reason a reader would choose this book over others in the popular computing field is that she or he has some interest in the uses of computers in medicine. The evaluation of this book as a whole must be based on those chapters that deal with the primary topic. This chapter merely lays the foundation for them. Trying to evaluate this book by this one chapter is like trying to evaluate a modern office building by inspecting a portion of the basement. In this case no serious problems are apparent, but the real test is left undone.