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JARGON, AN INFORMAL DICTIONARY OF COMPUTER TERMS. Robin Williams and Steve Cummings. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press, Inc., 1993. 676 pages, including appendixes and index. $22.00 (softcover).
THE NEW HACKER'S DICTIONARY. 2nd ed. Eric S. Raymond, ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993. 505 pages, including appendixes and list of contributors. $14.95 (softcover).
THE COMPUTER GLOSSARY: THE COMPLETE ILLUSTRATED DESK REFERENCE. Alan Freedman. New York, NY: AMACOM, American Management Association, 1991. 670 pages. $26.95 (softcover). Reviewer's note: Although this glossary has been on the market since 1991, it is reviewed here by way of comparison with the other two moue recent glossaries under review.
One of the meanings given by the American Heritage Dictionary for jargon is "the specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group." Another is "nonsensical, incoherent, or meaningless talk." Which of these two meanings the authors of Jargon had in mind when they entitled the book is open to question, since many of the terms bandied about in the computer world these days often seem incoherent and meaningless! And that's what makes this book so appealing: It not only defines esoteric computer terms such as "multi-threading," "megaflop," and "micro-channel," but, by explaining the concepts behind them, demystifies them as well.
As the principal author, Robin Williams (author of several books, including The Little Mac Book and The Mac Is Not a Typewriter), explains in her introductory note, "I wrote this book because I was frustrated with not being able to understand most computer dictionaries. The explanations were usually so brief, they assumed I knew a host of other things, and they never told me how this information was connected to anything else in my life or why it might be important for me to know this." To correct this deficiency, Williams has put a great deal of effort into providing a readable, interesting, and illuminating glossary of computer and computer-related terms. Her lighthearted and down-to-earth style, as well as her unabashed approach to the most arcane terminology found in the computer world, is quite refreshing. Here is a sample:
PROGRAM
A program is basically a coded set of instructions, written by humans, that tells the computer what to do. The program can be stored on disk (in which case...