Peter Coffee Teaches PCs

• Chapter 1 - Making the Box Answer Back
  
  
  
  • Booting Gets Your PC Ready to Begin
    
  • Memory Gives Your PC Room to Work
    
  • The Floppy Disk Drive: An Electronic Lifeboat
    
  • Storage Is Where Things Stay When the Power Goes Off
    
  • Putting You in Command
    
  • Dig Deeper from the DOS Window
    
  • Hey, PC, Talk to Me
    
  • Single File, Please
    
  • Fresh Raw Bytes
    
  • A Quick Brain Dump
    
  • This Is Brain Surgery
    
  • Remember: Files Are Fragile
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 2 - You and Your Faithful Files
  
  
  
  • Two Kinds of Bytes?
    
  • Today's Storage: Not Nearly Good Enough, But Getting Better
    
  • Changing the Way We Think
    
  • Suppose We Pretend to Have Files
    
  • Time to Stop Pretending
    
  • One-Way Data Doors
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 3 - Representing Data: Bits and Bytes, Words and Records, Colors and Codes
  
  
  
  • Why Bits?
    
  • Why Bytes?
    
  • The Address Space That Ate Cincinnati
    
  • Numeric Data Types
    
  • A World of Character Codes
    
  • Other Colorful Details
    
  • Sometimes, Bits Are Just Bits
    
  • Bags, Lists, and Other Useful Collections
    
  • Records: What Makes the World Go Around
    
  • Why There's a "Y2K" Problem
    
  • A Compressed Tour of Data Compression
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 4 - The Heart of the Machine
  
  
  
  • A Quick Review: The Trail That Brought Us Here
    
  • Chips Don't Do Anything New
    
  • Computer Architecture: Registers and Instructions
    
  • Meet the Pretendium Processor
    
  • Bits Are a Useful Myth
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 5 - The Practical PC
  
  
  
  • The Plan for This Chapter
    
  • Look at the Back of the Box
    
  • Going Inside
    
  • Mass Storage: Cherished Memories
    
  • Long-Distance Connections
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 6 - Seeing Is PCing
  
  
  
  • Not Quite Immune to Progress
    
  • Your PC's Fastest Interface
    
  • Rasters and Vectors
    
  • Colors: Making Them "Right"
    
  • Fonts: Extended Families of Informative Design
    
  • Energy Star: Look for the Logo
    
  • Buying Your Video Adapter and Display
    
  • Buying Hard-Copy Equipment
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 7 - Shake Hands with Your Modem
  
  
  
  • What a Modem Does
    
  • Beyond POTS: 56K and ISDN
    
  • Extreme Connectivity: Satellite and Cable
    
  • Protocols: Party Manners for Our Modems and Connections
    
  • Buying and Using Your Modem
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 8 - Eyes, Ears, and Voices
  
  
  
  • Everybody's Doing It
    
  • We'll Only Look at What Matters
    
  • Paying by the Bit
    
  • Digital Sound: It's Just a Hi-Fi Modem
    
  • Creative Sound: Composing and Performing with MIDI
    
  • All About "Digital Film"
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 9 - Portable Possibilities
  
  
  
  • Portables Keep Getting Better
    
  • "Better?" Compared to What?
    
  • Plan for This Chapter
    
  • Portable Power: The Care and Feeding of Batteries
    
  • Displays and Presentation Facilities
    
  • Keyboards
    
  • Portable Pointing Devices
    
  • Handheld Machines
    
  • Staying Connected
    
  • Hard Knocks: The Hot (and Cold) Cruel World
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 10 - When the Honeymoon Is Over
  
  
  
  • Episode 1: An Ominous Silence
    
  • Technical Support: Someday, You're Going to Need It
    
  • Episode 2: More Help Than You Can Imagine (But Less Than You Need)
    
  • Episode 3: Success! Then Setbacks...and Survival
    
  • Epilog: The Moral of the Story
    
  • Utility Software: Swiss Army Knives Versus Snake Oil
    
  • Upgrading: "There's Grandfather's Axe"
    
  • What About Used PCs?
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 11 - The State of Our Software
  
  
  
  • Good Software Is a Matter of Opinion
    
  • Some Things Just Have to Be Learned
    
  • Uncivil War: Programmers Versus Users
    
  • Data Matters, Too
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 12 - The Suite Spot: Where Software (Mostly) Works Right
  
  
  
  • Your Job Doesn't Come on a CD-ROM
    
  • Software Suites Let You Define the Job
    
  • Well-Dressed Words Get Attention
    
  • Clean Up Your Spreadsheet with Logic
    
  • Communications: Just Another Kind of Document
    
  • Moving Data Across Different Tools
    
  • Lists of Data Can Look Smart, and Act Smart
    
  • The Document as a Container
    
  • Creating the Data-Enriched Document
    
  • Building an Executive Suite
    
  • When the Pieces Work Together
    
  • A Copy That Keeps on Copying
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 13 - Word Processing, Plain and Fancy
  
  
  
  • Breaking Lines Is Bad to Do
    
  • Tables: Take Time Now to Save Time Later
    
  • Do You Get the Picture?
    
  • Competition: Focus on Ease of Use
    
  • Inspiration: A Different Way of Working with Ideas
    
  • Back to Embedded Codes: Living with HTML
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 14 - By the Numbers: Spreadsheets and Other Math Tools
  
  
  
  • Spreadsheets: Propelling the PC Invasion
    
  • Don't Kid Yourself: You Aren't Suddenly Smarter
    
  • Making Assumptions Explicit: Crystal Ball
    
  • Forecasting: Beyond the Simple Trend
    
  • Scheduling and Task Planning
    
  • Data Visualization
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 15 - Listing Heavily: PC Database Management
  
  
  
  • List Management Is the Beginning
    
  • From the List to the Database: Why and How
    
  • The Tables Are the Data
    
  • There Are Relationships Between Groups of Records
    
  • Some Questions Get Asked Many Times
    
  • Database Forms: For Entry and Review
    
  • Reports Adjust Themselves to Current Data
    
  • Approach Models Common Tasks
    
  • Industrial-Strength Data
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 16 - Inform, Persuade, Deceive: Graphics and Presentations
  
  
  
  • Presentations Change Minds
    
  • Prepackaged Presentation Experts
    
  • It's Hard to Be Consistent
    
  • CAD Offers Precision at Different Scales
    
  • "Smart" Paint Programs Figure Out What They're Seeing
    
  • A Tool for Every Purpose
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Chapter 17 - Roses and Thorns: Imperfect Systems, the Internet, and Cybercrime
  
  
  
  • Are We There Yet?
    
  • The Internet: A Road Around the World
    
  • Traveling the World Wide Web
    
  • Cybercrime
    
  • What We've Learned
    
    
  
  
• Appendix A - Common PC File Types: File Name Extensions and File Descriptions
  
  
• Appendix B - Products Mentioned in This Book
  
  
• Glossary
  
  
• Index