Yet another book trying to cash in on the enormous success of Apple Computer’s HyperCard for the Macintosh, the Concise guide to HyperTalk claims to provide the “experienced” HyperTalk programmer with a “concise reference work.” The book contains no index; consequently, it offers little help to a reader who does not know exactly what he or she is looking for. It is simply a collection of manual pages for the HyperTalk programming language.

After four chapters on various aspects of HyperTalk programming basics, the book contains a chapter for each of the HyperTalk programming language areas: commands, functions, and properties. Each chapter contains entries in alphabetical order, with each entry in an easy-to-read form not unlike a UNIX manual page. The book also includes an ASCII table and a chart that summarizes HyperTalk objects and their properties.

HyperCard itself provides an equally comprehensive on-line guide to HyperTalk. Experienced HyperTalk programmers would probably prefer to use the HyperTalk section of HyperCard’s “Help Stack” rather than this book for simple syntactic information about HyperTalk.