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Learning Your Computer Program From A Book
Like the song from The Mikado, their catalog is long and goes from passion ranging. This is the remarkable world of O’Reilly and its associated publishers, all of which publish the most remarkable computer instruction books since the invention of the computer.
One need only hearken back to WordStar, the first of the major public word processing programs, to understand the need for computer books. WordStar came with a mimeographed manual. It wasn’t exactly opaque, but had I not had children who, at the age of 15 and 11, were computer geeks, I’d still be writing in pen and ink. Every application since then – it was 1981 – has had either an inadequate manual, or a negligible manual that asked you to rely on the Help button to get you through it. Opacity seemed to be the rule. What is equally remarkable is that even today, some two decades after the invention of the first popular personal computer (the IBM PC, August, 1981), there is virtually no program whose complexity can be mastered by simply turning on the switch. As the common complaint goes, if cars were like computers, we’d all still be on horseback.
In all this time, the need for books to explain computer applications has proliferated. During the first few years, as computer applications became more sophisticated, their complexity seemed to outpace the learning curve of ordinary consumer – those of us without degrees from MIT. Vast sums of money were spent by application producers for help desk services, not all of which were genuinely helpful. Today, the help desk business is vast, with a whole industry outsourced to places like India and, for all we know, Shangri La. Naturally, the more unstable the program, it seems, the more they charge for help. Sometimes, it seems, you have to keep repurchasing your application in help desk fees. The only salvation continues to be the computer book.
There have subsequently been many books and many book publishers, and some of them have been pretty good. The Microsoft Press puts out some good ones, and there are a few others. But O’Reilly is not only consistently good, but invariably goes deeper into the heart of the matter than most. Their authors seem to be at one with the inner quirks and mysteries of computer applications, which is why their books are so superior, and have the consistent ability to communicate what they know.
O’Reilly, in its early days, wisely sensed the need to go to the heart of those things that annoyed readers most in trying to function easily with computers, and their Annoyances series went beyond the normal how-to by addressing the anomalies. As their books grew in popularity they expanded to cover the needs of both computer professionals and the average consumer. A book like Google Hacks, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, for example, tells you more about eking the last drop of good from Google than most people know exist. They call it 100 Industrial-strength Tips and Tools, and indeed, that’s what they are. Google is a much more complex program than can be discerned in normal commerce, and its mysteries and opportunities are explained here.
Of all the books on Windows XP, the most cogent is O’Reilly’s Windows XP Pro – The Missing Manual, by David Pogue, Craig Zacker, and L.J. Zacker. Windows XP, as everybody knows, doesn’t come with a manual. To the newcomer to computing, it’s like being given a key to an airplane and told to start your engine, even if you haven’t had a flying lesson. In place of a printed manual, the application asks the user to depend upon online help screens. “Unfortunately,” say the authors, “these help screens are tersely written, offer very little technical depth, and lack examples and illustrations. Many of the help screens are actually on Microsoft’s web site, which means you can’t actually see them without an internet connect.” Which, they point out, is not always feasible when you most need the help. This book starts with the getting started basics, and covers the network, security, the Service Pack 2, spyware, and much, much more. Everything from basic how-to to trouble shooting. It’s clear, it’s comprehensive, it’s in plain English, and covers every feature of the program including some you didn’t know were there.
Windows XP Power Hound, by Preston Gralla, addresses the underused features of the application, and offers tricks and shortcuts that can take you to speed and efficiency that one wonders whether even Microsoft itself knows about. Windows XP is a powerful program that does infinitely more than most day-by-day users know about, and has many aspects that can be annoying and frustrating. But, says the author, there are countless features, powerful tricks, and shortcuts that Microsoft takes no pains to make known to the everyday user. Windows XP Power Hound delivers this information on a silver platter, covering a range that goes from system speedups to mastering the Registry. It’s a remarkable work.
The most useful book about the internet is their Internet Annoyances, also by Preston Gralla. It’s a sweeper for virtually every ordinary internet annoyance you’ve ever had. It’s broken down into useful chapter categories, such as General Email Annoyance, Spam, Outlook, GMail, Eudora 6, and other appropriate categories. Reads like a dream, too, and is full of stuff you thought you knew but don’t. A joy and a pleasure.
For the increasing number of home network users, there’s Home Network Annoyances, by Kathy Ivens. It does for the home network what Internet Annoyances does for the internet.
The O’Reilly pocket reference series includes a number of portable guides that are handy to have in reaching distance of your computer. Typical is Windows XP Pocket Reference, by David A. Karp. It gets to the point quickly, covering the kind of information about all aspects of Windows that can momentarily confound you. It covers the basics, shortcuts registry tweaks, command prompts, and security. A gem.
O’Reilly also distributes the books of a few other publishers, such as Paraglyph Press. The books they distribute are often as good as their own, which means that there’s some quality control at work. Degunking Your Email, Spam, And Viruses, by Jeff Duntemann, helps cut away the serious problems that becloud our email these days. It’s state-of-the-art, which is pretty hard to do in the face of the growing attacks from virus writers and spammers.
If there’s any single thing that characterizes the O’Reilly books it’s an uncanny technical skill not normally found in how-to computer books, and the ability to communicate complex technical ideas to the average computer user.
It might well be said that the history of computer books is the history of the computer, particularly the PC. Prior to the advent in 1981 of the IBM PC, computer users were experimental scientists and students, groping their ways through their own imaginations My son, Jonathan Marcus, was one such. As a physics student in the late 1970s, he and others like him could be found in the basement of the college physics laboratory at 2 A.M., playing with computers, learning, inventing. He built his own computer a year or two before IBM came out with the PC. We could barely dream (although he did) that the personal computer would become ubiquitous. He is now a very senior technical engineer in a major computer company in Silicon Valley.
But even now that there are probably as many computer users as there are telephone users, the complexity has not yet been substantially reduced for easy access by non-technicians. Jonathan once explained the meaning of interface to me. “There is a vast complex of technology that makes a television set work. The interface to that complexity is a few simple controls.” Would that computers could reach to the depths of their complexity. The motto here is, “Man is the master of the machine – but only with tech support.”
And as computers became more complex, they not only did more, they became more difficult to use beyond a few basic applications. Too few users know how to access the full range of program capabilities.
That’s what makes the computer book more valuable -- and even necessary. And that’s the service performed by serious and conscience publishers like O’Reilly. It seems that they won’t quit until you and I know how to live effortlessly with our computers.