BOOKS
TILTING AT THE SOFTWARE WINDMILL
The ANNOYANCES Books And How They Grew
THE ANNOYANCES SERIES. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Sebastopol, CA
The motto around here is, Man is the master of the machine – but only with tech support.
We are not the first, I’m sure, to note that if cars required the same kind of skill and concern to run them as do computers, we’d all still be riding horses. The computer, today, still demands a measure of technical skill and concern that precludes turning the bloody things on and watching them run like our watches do. Of course, we forget the early days of the automobile, when the most popular song was, "Get out and get under your automobile." The early days of the automobile, it seems required the same kind of skill and attention by non-mechanics as does the computer today. And in fact, one of my best friends – literally – is a guy I’ve never met in person, but he’s someone I talk to more than anybody I know. He’s a techie at Microsoft, without whom I couldn’t say three intelligent things on this web site. Brett is more valuable to me – and the others he serves – than my doctor or my lawyer.
For everybody else, though, there’s a series of manuals that may make Brett obsolete. Well, not literally – Brett is too good. But the O’Reilly Annoyances series come darn close. And even Brett confesses that he likes them.
This guy O’Reilly is now a publisher, but he seems to have started life as a techie. He got fed up with obtuse manuals, and bugs, and careless and thoughtless programming. And while everybody elsewhere was writing manuals that took what the production manuals said and turned them into simplified English, O’Reilly started producing the Annoyances series, which go well beyond that.
Most other manuals go for simplifying the how to, but the Annoyances manuals go for the glitches – the real reasons why the term "piece of cake" is so hilariously irrelevant to most software. It’s as if somebody like Yogi Berra, the legendary baseball manager, had gone through the manuals and asked, "Ain’t nobody here know how to play this game?", and then went on to explain it in terms that could be understood by the densest of amateurs.
It’s to the O’Reilly books you go to cope with the irrationality of both modern software and the manuals that obfuscate the obtuse. And incidentally, The O’Reilly books all have those marvelous covers, with extraordinary pictures of animals and birds. Probably because the software world is a zoo.
In OUTLOOK ANNOYANCES (by Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J.Lee) (Click here to order), for example, it makes much of the glitches in email, and helps you bring Outlook up to speed in that and other areas. It tells you how to customize the toolbar in ways that Microsoft doesn’t tell you or make clear. It makes sense out of the confusing interface settings. It reports on fixes that only engineers know, and gives them to you in plain English.
OFFICE 97 ANNOYANCES (by the same authors) (Click here to order) shows you how to expand the uses of the arcane features to make the program work the way Microsoft wishes it would work without outside help.
WINDOWS 98 ANNOYANCES (David A. Karp) (Click here to order) helps you move smoothly from WIN95 into this new world. Customizing, which is crucial if you don’t want to be swamped by the manufacturer’s vision of what’s good for him but not necessarily for you, becomes your secret weapon with this book – as with others in the series. Comes with a CD full of utilities to help you through cold nights at the keyboard.
WORD 97 ANNOYANCES (by Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J.Lee) (Click here to order) goes more deeply into the structure of the program than any of the manuals, allowing you to make Word 97 more accessible and useful.Word 97, the authors note, is one of the most flexible applications around, if you know how to use it. It also contains some of the most annoying quirks. This book is the roadmap through the minefield.
STOPPING SPAM (Alan Schwartz and Simson Garfinkel) (Click here to order) may be the most liberating work since the Magna Carta. It’s a guide to what it is -- unwanted email -- and how to prevent it.
The list keeps growing. Check it out at http://www.oreilly.com. Or http://annoyances.org.
Woody Leonhard has a great site at http://www.wopr.com. And the programs described in the books are available at http://www.ora.com.
The world needs more stuff like this.