Technical and editorial consultant on more than 20 books about PCs and the Internet:

• Selected the material
• Wrote new features
• Rewrote and updated content
• Checked text and illustrations for technical accuracy

Beginner’s Guide to Home Computing - updated for Microsoft Windows Vista
A friendly guide to computing for the novice, including many “how to” articles on everything from word processing to home finance.

The PC Problem Solver
A troubleshooting guide to help even the most technophobic reader.

Get More from Your PC
Turns beginners into power users.

Sample entry:
Tiling Background Image
Just as tiling can add a decorative effect to your kitchen or bathroom, so it can to the background of your Web page. What’s more you only need one tile, whatever space you have to cover.

The way it works is for a single small image (“tile”) to be downloaded which can be repeated infinitely, however big the page. This process, known as tiling, is also a good way of creating a layered effect on the Web, as text, graphics and links can go over the top of the tiled background.

However, you need to bear in mind the contrast between the text and the image underneath. If you have a light background use dark type, or light type if you have a dark background. The background tiles should also be consistently dark or light. Otherwise if you have a mixture neither the dark or light type is going to show up reliably. The code to add a background tile is but like the debutante at the ball, you do need to decide if you want to show the seams. A tile with seams has a wallpaper style effect. It has an obvious border. To create seamless tiles is a lot trickier, but graphics tools, such as Adobe’s ImageReady do make the process easier.

Sample entry:

ASCII Art…
Just as the original cave dwellers crafted their paintings out of unlikely materials, good old plain text has also been developed as decorative art.

The punctuation characters and spaces from ASCII have been crafted into illustrations to reflect the feelings of people writing in chat rooms, newsgroups or emails.

The smiley face (code) (/code) created using a colon, hyphen and closing bracket was the first, but now a whole dictionary of expressions has emerged. They have also gone from simply portraying emotion (emoticons) to physical description, e.g. (:-))))))))))) someone wearing a tie, and even objects such as >[] to represent a television.