This is the first Dummies book I've ever read, and I had high hopes of it. I am a partial nerd (dreaming in HTML and happy with FTP etc.), but until I bought my iMac I had never ever used a Mac of any kind before, and there are basic things I have still to learn.

Sure I've grown up with Commodore PETs, Sinclair Spectrums, MS-DOS, Windows3.1 and Win95, and on plugging in my iMac I was confronted with a fairly familiar windows environment, but I found that the good people at Apple computer take a great deal for granted. They think their machine is so easy to use it needs no documentation, for one (hence the need for a book like this).

Apple also make infuriating reference in the troubleshooting guide to the 'option' key. Now, on my iMac at least, there is no button marked 'option'... and even though I've been told by Mac-owning friends that the Option key is the Alt key with the zig-zaggy line, between 'Control' and the Apple/Four leaf clover key, I keep forgetting this. At least this Dummies book would get me straight once and for all on this...

WRONG! On page 34 of The iMac for Dummies the Option key makes its debut: "in addition to the shift key, one says option, one says Ctrl...". No it doesn't! Perhaps all old Macs had 'Option' written on this key, but bearing in mind this book is aimed at people new to computers let alone Macs, I find this kind of assumption by Mac-heads a) infuriating and b) almost universal.

My Option key bugbear aside, the rest of the book does contain nuggets of useful info, such as how to avoid the CD autoplay virus and how and why you need to rebuild the desktop. It is rather US-orientated, however, devoting sections to the bundled software us peasants in the UK didn't get, and in a side-panel on printers it says "Why have America's scientific geniuses invented all these different kinds of printers?" - well I'd always imagined Japan to be at the cutting edge, at least when it comes to inkjet printers, but what do I know? All the support numbers quoted in the book are North American ones and much of its internet section is devoted to America Online; as for using an ISP it just says you should get your ISP to tell you how to configure your iMac - not bad advice but then why bother buying a book like this?

I'd have like to have seen something on configuring Outlook Express for multiple mailboxes, for example. It's good that the book mentions one of the great hazards of going online - junk e-mail or spam. However, I'm not sure that the suggested solution is good enough - using a seperate mailbox on web pages and posts to newsgroups. After all, you still have to download all that junk mail, even if you can keep it apart from your personal mail.

The section on ditching unnecessary control panels and extensions is interesting - after all unused extensions do slow down the booting up of you iMac and can cause conflicts which make a dreaded crash and fumble for the paperclip more likely. I do wonder, however, if Mr Pogue is a little gung-ho in suggesting that you actually trash unwanted extensions... okay, you do save hard disk space as well that way, but I imagine you'd have to do a clean install to get them back. And trashing all your networking extensions might seems like a good idea now, but in the wise words of Mr Pepperman, 'you may not want them now, but who knows what the future holds!' Your iMac may end up in a networked environment one day, and should your playful plastic pal go badly wrong one day you may need someone to sniff up its ethernet port (if you'll forgive the canine imagery) in order to retrieve that last chapter of your novel that you didn't have time to back up. So, I'd have thought just turning unwanted extensions off is a much better bet than trashing them - if anyone would like to comment on this I'd be grateful!

The book was quite amazingly up-to-date, including clearly labelled sections on OS 8.5, and the section on peripherals mentions that Syquest has gone bust. One of the peripherals is a transparent blue power surge protector, widely bundled with iMacs in the US, which says a lot about life in the US - along with the transparent blue handgun bundled with the iMac in many states. (I may have made that last bit up, as Simon Hoggart would say).

In an attempt to be really future-proof it refers to AppleWorks throughout, whereas it was still ClarisWorksat the time of publication ...and speaking of ClarisWorks, there's a bit of a boo-boo in its description of the Drawing application. It says the tool buttons are 'pretty much covered in the section on drawing programs in the preceding chapter' - um, I think this is the chapter on drawing programs, Mr Pogue! Perhaps this betrays a bit of a cut-and-paste job on one of his previous Mac books...

Pogue's sense of humour might grate as well (he's rather too fond of the word 'doodad', if you ask me), but some of the jokes are well-aimed and the screenshot of Microsoft Word with all the button bars switched on is hilarious - there is just about enough room in the middle of the screen to see 4 lines of text.

All in all, a good book for the complete novice, and if you're fluent in Windows95 but have never touched a Mac before - that means you! I wish I'd had this book in Autumn 1998...