How-to Guide Books

CorelDRAW 7 For Dummies by McClelland, King and McCelland

Corel are keeping the old, but good, versions of their products, such as CorelDRAW 7, on the market at much reduced prices. This encourages people like us to keep upgrading, but behind the bleeding edge. This book is very good at making it easy to jump to the next version and it is a great refresher when you have not used the product for about six months and all of a sudden need to do something. See also the next book below.

CorelDRAW Design Workshop by Hamlin and Meyer
This book is probably the best of its kind and may be the only one of its kind in the computer world. Have you ever wanted to create one of those lovely, smooth curved banner thingys and wrap it around a nicely extruded set of letters? Of course you have! Don't lie! Well, you can learn all about the extruded letters in the book above, but this book has a zillion examples of all those really neat things you can do and it shows you how to do every one of them. If you are going to buy one of these, buy two and give one to a friend or colleague. It is such a good book. Ours is always within reach.

Microsoft Office 97 Programming With VBA for Dummies by Jaskolka and Gilbert

If you are not a natural programmer, which most of us are not, this is one of two good books for coming to grips with this language. If you know WordBasic, the biggest hurdle is getting used to the object methodology, but once you are there, it is worth the effort if you want to seriously address mass manipulation of text in Word files. And it is the only way to get control of the crazy implementation of number streams in Word 97 (that is not covered in this book, but it is what you can end up managing to control!)

Sams Teach Yourself Excel 97 in 10 Minutes by Fulton

The title lies! It is a series of 10 minute sessions. But don't quibble — it works as advertised!

Teach Yourself Powerpoint 97 in 24 hours by Haddad and Haddad

Ahh! Truth in Titles! This is the correct time and it is a very good book — especially when you have learnt it all in detail before but have lapsed into being an occasional user. It is also very good for getting out of trouble when you have volunteered to do something for someone who is in a hurry and then the wheels fall off!

Teach Yourself Access 97: Visually by Maran

This is on our to read and do pile. However, the approach is very appealing and looks easy to comprehend. We have some advantage in that we have worked with these kinds of products before and we are expecting it to provide an easy bridge to a new product from our point of view.

Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page, Fourth Edition by McFedries

Rob's personal web page grew out of this book. Love the page or hate the page, it works in the three common browsers, it is all hand crafted (the "WYSIWYG" packages are too proprietary to automatically provide compatible code for all three browsers). This book teaches you HTML 4, not Cascading Style Sheets, and it works as advertised. When you have learnt it, you can take the output of the "WYSIWYG" packages and adapt it to be compatible.

Rob's home page is now used as a teaching aid — try this exercise. Once you learn about style sheets, the task is to create style sheets for Rob's site without changing its existing appearance in all three browsers and then to craft a new site, being as creative as you like but (a) it must convey the same personal air and (b) it must work in all three browsers. But we digress. This Dummies book is a good starting point (even if you hate Rob's home page). Please also see the next two entries.

Sams Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours by Oliver
This book is partly responsible for the Lasotell site, together with the next book below. Moving up to style sheets and the more elaborate page takes time and a reasonable amount of experimentation. This book helps by providing a number of clear examples and has a good eye on design issues all the way through. If you think the Lasotell site has good features, such as quick loading and easy to use, you can thank this book.

Cascading Style Sheets, Second Edition: Designing for the Web by Lie, Bos and Caillau

The move to Cascading Style Sheets is quite easy if you have a proper understanding of how style sheets are meant to be used in Word, FrameMaker and so on. If not, it just adds another new layer to learn, along with all the other new things. The nice thing about style sheets is they make it easier and quicker to produce a consistent appearance across the site. The downside is that the three browsers, which are not all that compatible at the HTML level (because of their proprietray extensions), are even less so at the style sheet level. Micrsoft IE5 does the best job of implementing the style sheets, Opera is next and Netscape is third (if you do not believe me, try viewing this site in the three browsers — this site has been built purely by hand from the ground up, according to the Style Sheet standards on virtually every page). This book is very readable and has a number of worked examples from real sites to show how to adapt the sites to style sheets (you can use these examples in working the exercise for Rob's home page described for the Dummies book above).

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Internet by Kent

Every newbee/novice/whatever (and we were all one once) needs every helping hand available these days in trying to do anything on computers. You ever noticed how little time anyone who knows what to do has to actually teach a newbee? It sure does not happen on most jobs — and that is where, increasingly, people are needing help the most. This is a lifejacket that will save the newbee's sanity and self-respect.