Official FrontPage 98 Book, Kerry A. Lehto and W. Brett Polonsky, Microsoft Press, 372pp, Stg£22.99.
Official Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory, ed Kerry Carnahan, 1,128pp +CDRom, Stg£37.49.
The very concept of Microsoft Press inspires mixed feelings. Without lining up with those who like to bash Microsoft indiscriminately, it is clear that Microsoft becoming a major publisher of books about its own products has as many potential pitfalls as it has obvious benefits.
On the plus side, who better to describe the intricacies of a piece of software than experts from the company which put it together? Programs are getting more and more complex (look at all the things a wordprocessor does nowadays) and surely insider expertise can help? Well yes, but the first and most obvious issue here is value for money. Traditionally, consumers paid for a program and with it enough information to make it work. If you pay £120 or so for a copy of Microsoft FrontPage, for example, you get a slim, tutorial-oriented paper manual and substantial online reference. As it happens, this is pretty good - enough for most people who know something about the Web to just jump in and go. Beginners should also be able to start out with the step-by-step tutorial and move on into using the online help. So where is the value in a £23 book on the subject? Is it a matter of the manual being taken out of the box and put on sale separately?
Perhaps not. Not everyone likes using online references. Books from Microsoft Press (and other publishers) provide paperphiles with information in their preferred form. And whether you favour paper or not, it is certainly easier to read paper-based information than online help on the bus or in the bath.
Of course, but what sort of information are you soaking up with the bubbles? Book publishers whose volumes comment on other people's software have a level of distance and independence from the product which a subsidiary publishing company must find it difficult to achieve. Authors are often genuinely enthusiastic about the programs they write about, but whose enthusiasm are readers most likely to take at face value? And which type of author is likely to be most brutally blunt about the bugs and other failings that are part of the price of increasingly complex software?
There is also a minor semantic point. MS Press is inclined to prefix the word "official" to its titles - a bit like people who mark every banal email as "urgent". It's not just that the deep-buried anarchist in me has the same sort of aversion to "official" viewpoints as it does to the marketing babble that routinely prefixes "executive" or "luxury" to what, in fact, is the half-way-decent version of the product. It is the connotation of ownership and authority that the word carries. Certainly, if you produce a program like FrontPage you can produce the "official" guide to it - but how on earth did the Internet directory become "official"? Have we all missed a small press release beginning "Microsoft is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Internet..."
Therein lies part of the problem. Microsoft has leveraged the widespread use of its operating systems into near-domination of desktop applications and is increasingly prominent in server operating systems, back-end applications and online publishing, as well as experimenting in a range of other areas, including television, event guides, geographical systems and travel information. The idea that its massive resources, technical expertise and marketing skill are now being focused on technical book publishing sends at least a small shiver of concern. With all of that out in the open, how do these two books stand on their own merits? Quite well, really. The FrontPage guide is not exactly lively reading once you get past the preamble which documents the birth of the program in a small software company and its leap to prominence once Microsoft had bought it out. "Whereas Vermeer [the original authors] had sold at total of 275 copies of FrontPage in the company's short life," writes Randy Forgaard, co-founder of Vermeer, "Microsoft sold 150,000 copies of FrontPage in the first three months."
The book does, however, provide a steady step-by-step introduction to the features of a very strong Web-publishing system. Like a patient teacher working through a syllabus, each element and feature is documented. The style may not sizzle, but the information is there. One irritant is the condescending swipes at the notion of learning the HTML coding used in Web pages. Granted, with this program you don't have to write in raw HTML, but knowing a bit will help to get the best out of FrontPage and is essential to filling some gaps in the program.
The Internet directory overcomes the paradox of using static, rapidly dating paper to create a directory of the fluid, ever-changing Internet by its sheer scale. Dipping into any section, from Animals to Youth Resources will turn up some new sites for even the most assiduous Net-head. Open it almost anywhere among the 6,000 entries and there will be a "gosh, I must try that" site somewhere to hand. The effect is a renewed sense of wonder at the information extravaganza hosted on the Net.
Whether it is the last word as a reference is open to question when looking at entries close to home. The entry for The Irish Times on the Web is out of date by three years and reads very like a slab of press-release-ese. But with the inclusion of a searchable CD-Rom and online updates, this book makes a strong case as a good first (paper) step in finding things on the Net.