Home computing in the ’90s is an ornery beast. While slick ads ask “Where do you want to go today?” and promise rich worlds of colour and interactivity, thousands of consumers struggle just to install their CD-ROM drives. Oh, cutting-edge multimedia is exciting all right, but it’s also something of a pig to use. And, as is the norm in the electronics industry, most user manuals leave a lot to be desired.

Rising to fill the void is yet another crop of instructional books: titles designed to explain all the ugly technical details of multimedia in plain, friendly English. That these books even exist should be a major embarrassment for the folks of Silicon Valley. But things have worked this way for more than a decade, and I doubt they’ll change in this lifetime. On the bright side, at least someone has bothered to publish some answers.

How Multimedia Works isn’t, strictly speaking, an instructional guide; it’s more of a coffee-table guide to new-wave consumer electronics. With gorgeous illustrations and crisp, sensible writing, it explains what multimedia is, how computer video works, and why some digital audio clips sound better than others. At times, it reaches too far for its own good – when it claims that multimedia will cure the education cash crunch, for example – but for the most part, it’s a well- thought-out, sensible guide to a hype-soaked industry. This book won’t help those already fighting with their CD-ROM
drives, but it will do wonders for anyone put off by big, intimidating buzzwords.

Multimedia & CD-ROMs for Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Multimedia have much in common with each other. Both have patronizing, insulting titles, both are full of lame humour, and both aim themselves at people who are timid about computing. Right down to the friendly icons that highlight the sidebars – technical discussions are marked with a bespectacled nerd in Dummies, and the words “SPEAK LIKE A GEEK” in balloon letters in Idiot’s – one book is nearly indistinguishable from the other. The two handle the basic details of sound-card and CD-ROM installation reasonably well, but they do poorer jobs with their troubleshooting guides.

Many users may well find themselves wondering just how CD-ROM titles are put together. Macromedia Director 4 for Macs for Dummies aims to answer that question. Director is a program used to produce interactive presentations; it’s behind many of the most popular CD-ROM titles. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the least forgiving applications available. In Silicon-Valleyspeak, it has a “steep learning curve.” But Director for Dummies is even less helpful than Multimedia & CD-ROMs for Dummies. It begins by wasting 25 pages explaining how the Mac works: double-clicking, pointing the mouse, and the like. Maybe I’m being naive, but I have trouble believing that anyone would set out to develop a CD-ROM without those skills. And when it comes time to actually explain Director, author Lauren Steinhauer runs out of steam. He explains the program’s features one by one, but never offers a single example. There are no exercises, no tutorials, none of the workshops that might have taken the fear out of using Director. Instead, we get bland humour and pointless, cutesy-poo asides: lines like “I’m dying for a pastrami sandwich” stuck in the middle of the File Menu section. There’s little here that a few good reads through the owner’s manual wouldn’t provide.

The prospect of creating a CD-ROM may entice a few ambitious souls, but the closest most of us are likely to get to multimedia development is writing Web pages. To that end, Internet Graphics Toolkit aims to demystify the business of preparing online pictures. Steve Rimmer writes well, and he explains the difficult business of .GIFs and .JPGs with wit and clarity. He has a disturbing fixation with net.porn, though, and his non-stop drooling over the goodies to be found in the alt.sex newsgroups gets old really fast.

Over the next two years, if the authors of VRML Sourcebook are correct, something called the Virtual Reality Modeling Language will revolutionize the Web. Flat pages will give way to colourful 3-D spaces, and virtual libraries will begin to look a lot like real ones. Wishful thinking, maybe, but after reading the book and working through a few of its projects, I’m convinced that virtual reality for the masses is nearly here. Learning VRML is no cakewalk, but this book makes it a pleasure – even for Net newcomers. It has a geekish bent – the big final exercise involves creating a virtual dungeon – but it’s always accessible.