These are dark days for the computer illiterate - those who feel life is passing them by because they fell unable to buy a computer, those who blanch in the face of a storm of technobabble, those who reach for a sledgehammer when the words RAM and baud crop up in polite company.

Now help is hand. Computer Wimp - subtitled 166 Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Bought My First Computer - contains a great deal of comfort for the Wimp. Wimpishness takes on a heroic nature, a sort of red badge of cowardice. However, there is a great deal contained within its covers that will delight, provoke, teach and outrage the rest of us, from the 'normal' enthusiast to the downright weird, plugged-in junky.

Mr. Bear is the perfect guide to the new technology - a true gadget freak whose steely enthusiasm has been forged in the proverbial white heat. He has lived, worked and wept with everything from a DEC mini to a Tandy desktop machine, wrestled with Apple plug-in cards and sweated blood over printer interfaces.

The text is accompanied by countless funny illustrations, and witty, clever or simply pertinent quotes from technowatchers down the ages. Like this one from an IBM spokesman in 1946: "Our machines are so complicated, the human element doesn't enter into them."

Under chapter titles like "The emperor's new computer...", "Never buy anything you can't lift" and "What to do when they start technobabbling...", Mr. Bear considers every aspect of thinking about buying, after buying, using and not using computers. And about programming ("Stand up for your right not to be a programmer"), the jargon ("baud rhymes with fraud, stands for Big Al's Universal Delivery, or possibly something else") and what to do when things go wrong (heard the one about the accounts program that deleted the figure 7 at random from data files?).

All in all, Computer Wimp is a splendid book. If you're a satisfied, dissatisfied or potential computer masochist, it lets you know what's in store. And when things go wrong, there's Mr. Bear Computer Consumer Karate guide.

This may be the funniest, most entertaining and most useful guide to computers ever.

Peter Worlock