BKHGTWFW.RVW 930915 Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Kelly Ford, Promotion/Publicity Coordinator P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 or 1 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867-9984 800-527-5210 617-944-3700 5851 Guion Road Indianapolis, IN 46254 800-447-2226 "Hacker's Guide to Word For Windows", Leonhard/Chen, U$39.95/C$51.95 This book will not appeal to the corporate types. Even granting that the authors have provided a warning symbol for the worst of their lunacy (a little figure who appears to be going "booga-booga" at you), the bulk of the text is very informal, perhaps even flippant. This will be amusing to fans of Monty Python, bemusing to the rank novice, mildly irksome to those looking for a reference, and completely unacceptable to the buttoned-down mind. The authors state that this work is for those who have learned to love Word for Windows, and you'd likely have to love the program to put up with some aspects of the book. Pity. Because beneath this carefree exterior is an incisive analysis and presentation of Word. The authors state that this book is not for newcomers to Word. This is not quite true. For those familiar with computers and text editing concepts, section one is an excellent introduction to the program, covering the oddities of the Word "paradigm" with succinct clarity. Word was the forty-seventh wordprocessor I learned, and it took me a full month to realize the information carried in those indistinguishable paragraph markers. But that is only the first section. And the first half of the section at that. The remainder of section one re-opens the question of who, or what, this book is for. First there is the title. A "hacker", in computerdom, usually refers to a programmer: a *good* programmer. The authors keep insisting, though, that the book is for *anyone*. Then, they launch into a long, though entertaining, story of the writing of a program. The story is laced, alternately, with comments of "See? Isn't it easy?" and chunks of C-like code ending with a program which, when completed ... doesn't work. Section two gets back to the user level with a grab bag of tips, bugs, tricks and self-praise for the DocCruiser program. We also have further evidence for the hacker mindset in statements such as "fun is better than useful." Certainly they haven't wasted a lot of time on thinking of how you would refer to all of this information. (Fortunately, the index is fairly substantial.) Having stated that the book is not an introduction to WordBASIC, section three seems to be precisely that. This is not an overview for those who have no experience with programming: all the jargon is there, and little is explained. However, most of the time you can figure out what you need to know about how to work in WordBASIC. If you don't understand a group of commands, you aren't likely to need them, at least not right away. Section four is a reference list of WordBASIC commands. As the introduction to the section states, this is the heart of the book. The commands are listed, and extensively described, including bugs and errors in the original documentation. Again, while this is ostensibly technical information, it is not difficult to read or understand the entries. Section five is again a rather unfocussed collection of information on WinWord fields and bookmarks, and Windows WIN.INI file settings. It is difficult to share the authors' enthusiasm for a program so bug-ridden and poorly supported by the documentation. Given the starting premise that a wordprocessor is a tool for manipulation, storage and printing of text, one comes away from the book with feeling that you could spend your life exploring the intriguing byways of Word for Windows ... and still not get any work done. This is not a wordprocessor, this is a toy with a wordprocessor as a front end. At the same time, one can see, after digging deeply enough, that there are a number of very powerful functions. Unfortunately, relatively few of them have much to do with text. Flipping through the command reference at random seems to turn up one text oriented command out of every five. (This may, of course, be unfair to the program. After all, it does "select" for commands which the authors are more interested in ... or those which have more bugs.) If you use Word for Windows extensively, this book is very likely a worthwhile investment. If you *must* use Word for Windows, this book may save you some peace of mind ... *always* a worthwhile investment. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKHGTWFW.RVW 930915 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag