Author: Dan Gookin, Wally Wang and Chris Van Buren Title: Illustrated Computer Dictionary for Dummies Year: 1993 ISBN: 1-56884-004-7 Pages: 6 + 408 + 4 Pub: IDG Books Worldwide Inc. 155 Bovet Road, Suite 310 San Mateo, CA 94402, USA Price: 12.95 USD I don't know whether I love more dictionaries or encyclopedias (I also read telephone directories), but I just can't get enough of them. I was very excited, when I got the Illustrated Computer Dictionary for Dummies in my hands. Then I opened it.. Visually the book is well designed: page headers have big numbers and tell the first and last word on the double page, the words itself are presented on light gray background and the used fonts are easy to read. This book is designed to be a fast reference in hard use. My troubles began with the text. The first item is backslash and I'm told it's used with MS-DOS paths. True, but it's very important in UNIX and C programming as an escape character! The more I read the more the book seems to be MS-DOS orientated. There are quite a few referencies to other operating systems and even some programming languages, but all the time I get "Yes, but.." thoughts. The words are mostly basic MS-DOS and Macintosh jargon with some general subjects (Star Trek). Occasionally I found words that have absolutely nothing to do with computers, which was rather refreshing. I missed some IMHO important entries: acronyms, especially TLA and TANSTAAFL, smileys, demo, jolt cola, netiquette.. Each word has a pronunciation guide, I think. They made no sense to me, but that was the first label under the title. I wish the book had used (standard) phonetic alphabets or at least given some kind of translation guidelines, but there was none. I would guess American users know how to read the given pronunciations, but I'm not an American. The "Meaning" and "Sentence" paragraphs have the information about the words and their use. Most of them have no practical examples, but some were quite funny. Actually they kept me reading on, looking forward to next weird, silly or just plain stupid (TCP/IP) phrase. Unfortunately there were some minor bugs in the text ("!TRUE = FALSE" is _not_ a good sample of C and the MS-DOS clock has 18.2 ticks a second), but in general this was the best computer dictionary I've seen so far. I would recommend it to both Macintosh and MS-DOS beginners. Experienced users might find this as a good gift to their close ones, the book has managed to capture something of the weirdness of the computerized world. Jouni Miettunen (jon@stekt.oulu.fi) 22 August 1995