Information Technology Law in Ireland by Dennis Kelleher and Karen Murray (Butterworths)
What is a computer? This might seem straightforward enough: in Florida, for example, it's defined as "an internally programmed, automatic device that performs data processing". But as this book points out: "This covers a computer but it also covers a digital watch." Legislators here and in Britain have shied away from giving a definition of the machines which are so central to our economies and modern life. Yet this book goes a long way to pinning down the area of modern IT law in Ireland and elsewhere. Its subjects range from satellite TV smartcards to databases, electronic commerce, authorship questions in multimedia compositions, the right to make back-up copies, and "computer misuse".
The authors emphasise that IT law "involves virtually all the legal disciplines", and non-lawyers are warned that tort and contract law are complex areas and that there is only so much that can be put in a 486-page book. The 1991 Criminal Damage Act and the Data Protection Act feature heavily, as do the various Copyright, Patents and Trade Marks Acts, and there are useful tables of statutes and cases cited. Some pettifoggers might find a tad too much opinion (is computer hardware without a program really a useless "and ugly" lump of plastic and circuitry?). Or they might quibble about the apostrophe abuse, split infinitives and so on. But this is an important and timely publication, not just for lawyers and students of the area. It should also become essential reading for those in the hardware, software and media industries in Ireland and elsewhere - as well as our legislators and policy-makers - for years to come.
Michael Cunningham
Hard, Soft & Wet: The Digital Generation Comes Of Age by Melanie McGrath (HarperCollins) £16.99 hbk
If the Internet is a form of virtual travel, then it's only a matter of time before virtual travel writing becomes its dominant literary genre. Those who've begun mapping its terrain include Douglas Rushkoff with his 1994 best-seller Cyberia: Life In The Trenches Of Hyperspace (Flamingo, £6.99), a highspeed tour of the "digital underground". Another variant is the "newcomer-there-at-the-beginning" account. In this case the novice ("newbie") follows a sort of Paradise Lost cycle: complete innocence about hi-tech stuff, followed by curiosity/temptation, then wonderment after the first bite of the Apple (or PC), infatuation and a total obsession until the inevitable disillusionment and final fall from grace.
John Seabrook's recent Deeper: A Two-Year Odyssey In Cyberspace (Faber, £12.99) has shades of this, but the genre's best example so far is Melanie McGrath's Hard, Soft & Wet.
Its delicious title (i.e. hardware, software and wetware, or humans) is a foretaste of McGrath's wry, observant style. For the sake of a good read she compresses four years (1993-96, when the Web and Internet invaded the mainstream) into a semi-fictional 12 months.
Her jaunt across the northern hemisphere, ostensibly to find out more about networks and computers, takes her from San Francisco to Reykjavik, Portishead (the place, not the band), Prague and Moscow (which "is like a game of Sim City gone wrong"). She hangs out with VR junkies and skip raiders, crackers, MIT hackers, a 17-yearold techno wunderkind (Harry Enfield would have to play him in the movie), and arcade addicts who explain the secret language of slot machines. Her semi-novelistic style catches conversations as effortlessly as a friend of mine catches colds. Hard, Soft & Wet is really about the melancholy of being stuck in the middle, being thirtysomething - she feels "like a swinging aunt" on her pilgrimage to the Tribal Gathering - and being decidedly English yet in love with a fantasy California. At one point she admits to a girl half her age that she has never actually played Streetfighter, then becomes "suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang". McGrath is of a transitional generation, she says, "unconvinced by the old myths but incapable of absorbing the new ones either". She is doomed to be the outsider in American/digital/ youth culture (all three converge into one).
In the end her romance with the Net dwindles, as do her love affairs with Americana and with a real-life bloke, and she ends up alone on New Year's Eve in Singapore - or "Disneyworld with the death penalty" as William Gibson once dubbed the place.
What she was really on, she says, was a nostalgia trip, a form of time-travel. Apparently searching for the future but ending up confronting her lost past.
Discover Excel 97 by John R. Nicholson and Sean R. Nicholson (IDG Books)
With Microsoft claiming more than 30 million users of Excel there is no doubting the market for teach-yourself books on the subject. This latest deals with the most recent version, Excel 7, a component of the Office 97 suite.
This book is part of the Discovery series from IDG Books who also produce the excellent ... for Dummies series. It is probably aimed at that section of the same market who prefer not think of themselves as dummies.
Organised into five parts, the first three deal with the basics of creating a spreadsheet through manipulating data and presenting it attractively. This includes selecting the right kind of chart to interpret rather than confuse the meaning of your data. Sections four and five are for the more advanced user. They cover creating macros, network file-sharing and using Internet technology to hyperlink between data on local disks, network servers and Web sites.
The chapter dealing with security and hiding information in worksheets is slightly misleading. It doesn't make it clear that to password-protect a workbook it's necessary to specify two passwords, one for read-only and the other for full access. If only one is entered it gives full read/write access. Also beware of the advice on hiding sheets in a workbook. Even someone with read-only access can find a way to read your hidden data.
The section on macros is understandably superficial, as Excel macros are written in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), a programming language which would need a manual of its own. However, Excel allows you to record your own macros without any knowledge of VBA and this is adequately covered in the section.
The book is well laid out with plenty of handy tips, warnings and graphics as well as a tear-out section with the keyboard shortcuts for the most frequently used functions. This is an excellent book for those who are already using Excel but feel they are only scratching the surface.
Mick Maguire
Scripting Languages, World Wide Web Journal Vol 2, No 2, £21.95
This issue of the World Wide Web Consortium journal carries the subtitle "Automating the Web". Developing and protecting standards is the consortium's main role and some previous journals have been heavily theoretical. By contrast, this one is mainly practical, including papers on VBScript, JavaScript, Curl, Python and how to use them to enhance a Web site. No discussion of this topic could overlook Perl, the scripting language so widely used that it's known as "the glue of the Internet". As well as papers on "Exploring CGI with Perl" and an introduction to the LWP Library for Perl, there is an interview with the creator of Perl, Larry Wall.
More philosophy than programming, the interview waxes lyrical at times: "I wanted the Perl community to function like a little bit of Heaven, where people are naturally helping each other. . ."
Fiachra O Marcaigh
Kai's Photo Soap Pentium PC, PowerMac, £39.99 (Microwarehouse, tel 01-4509888)
NO, not Photoshop - but Photo Soap, from the people who make Kai's Power Tools and Kai's Power Goo. And unlike Photoshop it doesn't cost an arm and two cloned legs.
This is a suite of image manipulation tools (erasers, brushes, pencils etc) for eliminating blemishes and scratches from digitised photos. It even includes a "red eye removal" tool. But what really marks it out from other image editing software is its classy, instinctive interface. As usual, Kai abandons the boring standard menu bar, and organises the editing areas into "rooms" (such as the Prep Room and Finishing Room), where you can scatter your tools around. Very easy to use, worth investing in if you work on a lot of photographs, and a lot of fun too.
Cybertrends Chaos, Power And Accountability In The Information Age by David Brown (Viking) £18 hbk
Cybertrends has already been out a couple of months, but its deep sense of the medium and long-term trends which are already shaping the world makes it well worth rooting out or ordering.
It is a breathtaking, sometimes scary picture of the emerging digital landscape. Brown swipes at many of the orthodoxies and leading figures of the digital "revolution", from Microsoft (inevitably) to Wired's Kevin Kelly and the Global Business Network, Nicholas Negroponte ("a Puritan with pomp"), and those offshore data havens that make the recent Ausbacher element in the payments-for-politicians scandal look like small fry indeed.
The jungle of footnotes can be off-putting at first, but this is well-written and refreshingly critical. Brown, a US writer now based in Europe, has a truly global perspective, unlike all those gushy books about "this wonderful global network" which never manage to see outside Silicon Valley or New York's latest cybercafe.
Ireland, A Song And A Story, Emce New Media, £39.95
Music and poetry are the mainstays of this CD-Rom which touches on Irish history, from the Famine through the War of Independence and the battle of the Somme. It's not a reference work, but takes a halfdozen songs by Johnny McEvoy as starting points and adds images, some video, and background historical information to each one (hence the "song and a story" of the title).
Developed by Johnny McEvoy and two partners with the help of a Forbairt feasibility grant, the CD-Rom was shown at the Milia multimedia festival this year and distribution deals are being negotiated for international versions.
FOM