More elegant way of writing my plugboard

[Space Dracula]

I'm using the series column with a series_index of zero to prefix books on my kindle, here's the behavior.

Series = 'Anthology', series_index = 0, title = "Robot Dreams"
-> Athology - Robot Dreams

Books with a non-zero series number come out like so

-> Foundation #02 - Some Spacey Book

And without a series just the title. Here's the code I use, broken over lines:

{series}
{series_index:'finish_formatting(strcmp($, 0, '', '', $), "02d", " #", "")'}
{series:'test($, " - ", "")'}
{title}

Is there a way of doing that more concisely? And I never got format_number to work ever. Windows portable and installed versions. It always output nothing even with numeric test values.

And is there a way to find the max number in a series for a particular author so you could do things like book X of Y. Doing it using inbuilt funcs without adding a custom column with the value.

Thanks.