It would be wonderful to find a good book that not only showed the innards of a working virus checker, but helped the reader to mutate it to inoculate against new strains. That is the cover promise of this new book.

Unfortunately, as soon as you skim its contents, the warning lights go on. Why would such a sophisticated book need a glossary that defines terms such as “ROM” and “word”? Why would it need an appendix containing an explanation of common Intel assembler instructions? Why would another appendix have to list common DOS and BIOS interrupt codes along with simplistic one-line explanations? This is surprising, when much better standard reference material containing this information may be found on the desk of any novice or aspiring assembly language programmer. Why, in fact, would such a book spend 25 percent of its pages on such stuff? Could it be to make it feel a little heftier to the hand than it does to the mind?

Returning to the content, there is a desultory and uninspiring history of the computer virus, followed by a similar chapter seeking to define “The Virus.” After this, 15 pages on virus detection techniques are quite good, but are  ruined  by a subsequent 4-page chapter on “Exterminating the Buggers.”

Some of the book is devoted to a discussion of the programming techniques used on the software included on disk. Please note that the code is not compiled.

The book is so introductory, not to say trite, that I first thought a student interested in assembly language might benefit from it. But despite an initial discussion that might be insulting even to an undergraduate, one could not perform some of the tasks suggested later in the book without previous assembler experience.

The tone of this book is patronizing, its humor fails, and much more substantive discussions of the topics covered can be found elsewhere. There is little to recommend this title to readers of Computing Reviews.