I've been using my Speccy Next for a few years. It's a wonderful machine, but the documentation and experience are VERY raw. The manual just doesn't have the immediacy of the original Spectrum manual.. It's tiny text, with long paragraphs, and there's just too much text. Text text text. I know the team needed to have some good documentation, but having it all in one massive manual is a real mistake imho.
The Spectrum Next manual needs to be split.
These need to be totally separate volumes, so people can just pick up the part they want to read.
In the absence of a more pared-down set of books I've been looking for something I can recommend to people as a more approachable set of books.. and... I'm struggling to find something that fits the bill.
But while looking, I stumbled across Simon Goodwin's "Next Tech". Apart from the hilariously bizarre AI front cover image, the book has been awesome. It doesn't just talk Next, it talks about all the decisions that have led to where we are. I'm hoping it can shed light on some of the really bloody weird design choices.. Like that one graphics mode that has all the even-numbered pixels in one block, and all the odd-numbered ones somewhere else. I mean.. why? I know it's probably for backward compatibility.. but.. seriously.. that was your best choice? Not just have two areas.. one for the old-fashioned half-res, and one nicely contiguous area for high-res? It's mindboggling.
So anyway, get this book. It starts out by just talking about history in general, and how we came to have such an eclectic set of machines.. It explains why Amstrad's variants were so different, and how the Next has to attempt to emulate all these different things....
I love it! Get this book!