Here's a quick guide to things that may be driving you nuts if you're used to Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 and you've never used a Mac before...

Where's the forward-delete key?
There isn't one. Either move to the end of the bit you want to delete and backspace, of highlight and press backspace. This is to make you use the mouse, I think. Talk about forcing devices... okay, here are some more...

Where are the home and end keys?
There aren't any! See above.

Where are the PgUp and PgDn keys?
Top right hand corner of the numeric keyboard - only not every application supports them. Ditto the 'home' key (next to help) that takes you to the top of a document.

Where's the # (hash) key?
You're probably only missing this if you hand-encode HTML... but on UK iMacs it's been replaced with the £ (pound) sign. To get a # hold down the alt (option) key and press 3.

How do I alt-tab switch between programs?
You can't, at least not if you have OS8.1 - you have to click on the icon at the extreme top right-hand corner of the screen to pop up a list of all the applications currently running. And when I first had my iMac I would leave dozens of apps open without even realising it (see below).
In OS 8.5 and above you can apple-tab between applications.

How do I make a window fill the screen?
You can't - get used to the cluttered, crazy world of the Mac desktop. Clicking the box with the box inside it at the top right of the window will make the window large enough to display its contents, but this doesn't mean it necessarily fills the screen. If you really really must fill the screen with a window, you might have to resize it manually.

How do I quit an application?
Press the apple key and Q togthether. Clicking in the square box at the top left hand corner of a window only closes that window, not the application!

Why are my application's windows floating round the screen?
Because they're meant to. The biggest difference between Microsoft Windows and the Mac's user interface is something that longtime Mac users (even those who use both PCs and Macs) never seem to notice. In Windows the menu bar with 'File, Edit, Search' etc stays glued to the window and moves with it, whereas in Macland the menu bar stays glued to the top of the screen. I think the Mac way is better, as no matter how small you make an application's windows, the esssential pull-down menus are always readable.

The Emergency Handbook refers to the 'option key' - where is it?
...and so do many applications, Mac magazines, Mac-owning friends and even The iMac for Dummies without any of them thinking it might not be obvious to you that it's the 'alt' key with the zigzag line, between 'control' and the Apple key. Apparently it's also bad form to call the Apple key the apple key, but it's quicker and easier than 'four leaf clover' or whatever that other symbol is - and less annoying than calling it the 'command key' when it doesn't say 'command' on it! I suppose us newbies could learn that alt is option and that apple is command, but I thought Macs were all about making life easy, about doing things the human way, not learning how the machine wants you to work... (flames on an email to the usual address).

My iMac has frozen - how do I reboot in a ctrl-alt-delete type way?
Press the apple (command) key, control and escape together to force an application to quit, or apple, control and the power button on the front of the iMac to restart the machine. In my experience the latter almost never works, and if you have a RevA Bondi Blue iMac you should reboot by carefully inserting an unfolded paperclip in the upper hole marked with a triangle in the cubby hole on the side of the iMac. I believe you can reboot new iMacs by holding down the power key for 6 seconds. NEVER pull the plug out of the wall or turn the power off - I'm convinced that's how my hard disk got trashed, and the paperclip always works in my experience. (Having said that, a gung-ho colleague of mine says he always yanks the plug out of the wall when his iMac crashes and he's never had a disk problem. I say he's just been lucky. So far.)

How do I associate another application with a file?
You can't. Well, not easily. This is another of the fundamental differences between Macs and Microsoft Windows, and it really only betrays the fact that the Mac has always had windows and icons, whereas a PC is a command-line DOS machine trying to look friendly. Whereas a PC file has a 3-letter extension like .GIF, .TXT or .WAV that defines what kind of file it is and you tell Windows what application you would like to launch when you double-click on files with particular 3-letter extensions, in Macland things are a little different. Not worse, not better, just different. The iMac for Dummies book uses the rather neat analogy of a parent and children - think of the application program that created a file as the parent, and the file itself as a child of the application. To take the analogy further, each file contains some DNA (in a part of the file called the resource fork) that says who its parent was, and this tells the Mac which application to launch when you click on it. There are several ways round this, without resorting to hacking the resource fork. Say you have saved a JPEG picture in Photoshop, but you're in a hurry or short of memory and only want to view it in JPEGView (a neat bit of postcardware). You can open the JPEGView application and then load the JPEG file that Photoshop created. An even quicker way might be just to drag the JPEG file and drop it on top of the JPEGView icon, and Robert's your avuncular relative - you've opened a Photoshop file in another application with one move of the mouse. This also works with a whole host of other applications - you can create a web page in BBEdit, and it will have the BBEdit icon on the desktop and indeed launch BBEdit if you double click on it. But drag your web page and drop it on the Netscape or Internet Explorer icons, and your spiffy new web page is rendered in all its web browser glory. (Actually, BBEdit lets you save files in a sneaky way so they look like another program created them, but they're mostly programs that only programmers would use - not anything useful like Netscape! ;-)

I've just uploaded some web pages but they've gone weird...
Check the settings in your FTP software - you've almost certainly uploaded them as Macbinary files or text. In Anarchie Pro 3.5, under the Settings menu, go to Transfer and tick Binary to be on the safe side. In Fetch (another common FTP program) go to the Customize menu, choose Preferences and pick the Upload tab. Again to be safe, select 'Raw Data' for both text and non-text. Oh, and do remember to suffix your web page files with .html, .jpeg, .gif etc, won't you! When you upload files to the internet the resource fork is stripped away (or it should be!) and you have to tell those poor benighted machines out there what do do with your images and text (damn, this pro-Mac bigotry is catching!)