A hand for computer learner-drivers

ECDL, The Complete Coursebook, Brendan Munnelly and others, Gill & Macmillan, 321pp, £16.99

ECDL, The Complete Coursebook, Brendan Munnelly and others, Gill & Macmillan, 321pp, £16.99

The European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) is a good idea - a Europe-wide framework for teaching and certifying basic computer skills. Instead of: "Ah sure I can do a few spreadsheets, of course", what it offers is a recognised qualification in using everyday computer tools.

It is not a trivial task to take someone from blissful ignorance of computers and their ways to competence in Word mailmerge, Excel autofill, creating an Access report and a lot in between. (Try picturing the book that tells a pedestrian everything needed to sit into a car and pass a driving test.) This book takes on the challenge of preparing for the ECDL and does it well. It offers a huge amount of information and a computer virgin with the right mix of confidence, persistence and aptitude might well be able to turn advice from the book into personal competence (saving themselves a lot of training fees in the process). More realistically, it could be a very helpful companion for anyone taking a course towards the ECDL. Unfortunately, there are also a number of errors, such as the identification of .exl as a common filename extension for programs.

Fiachra O Marcaigh

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Interaktive Computermaterialien: Post Primary German Language course, Goethe-Institut, Dublin, £15, CD-Rom

As most of Computimes is no more fluent in German than Basil Fawlty, we recruited a Junior Cert German student, Emma, to try out this German language CDRom. Developed by Horst Weber of the Goethe-Institut Dublin (www.goethe.de/dublin), it is aimed at students with three years or more of post-primary German. The texts and exercises are based on Weber's experience of teaching Leaving Certificate German and Emma found it ideal for building on Junior Certificate German.

It's a well-presented course, with a good mix of listening, reading and exercises. There are only three lessons, however, and the teenage student may tire of the main lesson's irate Papi berating his daughter for arriving home late from a party Another lesson does feature the imaginative use of Greenpeace web pages and Weber promises six lessons in the next release.

Emma would have liked more colour and excitement and Weber admits that the costs have been minimised in order to keep the price low for schools. This lowcost learning aid will be of great interest to Leaving Cert German teachers.

Tom Moriarty

Director in a Nutshell, Bruce A. Epstein, O'Reilly & Associates, 630pp, £18.76

Director is one of the most must-have tools for multimedia developers today. Its roots - like the buzzwords it uses - are in traditional animation and (to a lesser extent) the cinema.

Everything happens on a "Stage" - the user's viewport into your Director presentation. Here's the "playback head", there's the "Score", where each "frame" represents a slice in time, and you find yourself looping and "tweening" away, and. . .

Lost yet? If so, this reference book almost certainly isn't for you. It's not quite for beginners, and absolutely not for people who need hand-holding, but definitely required reading for most pros.

Bruce Epstein goes deep under the hood, covering many new features of Director 7 (a great leap forward), and its Internety young offspring Shockwave. He explains how to be far more productive and know at least a little bit more about a lot of things. He covers Cast library management, the Score, using Xtras, Shockwave and the Net, GUI components, graphics and palettes,and a fair amount on Lingo. There are also particularly useful sections about the runtime environment, and how to optimise performance and minimise memory usage, balancing the overheads and trade-offs.

The chapter on cross-platform/ OS issues (including quirks between different Windows operating systems) is really useful, though, inevitably, he barely scratches the surface on how to debug Windows or Mac configuration issues. Easily the best reference book on Director I've read - stick it next to Epstein's excellent companion book, Lingo in a Nutshell.

Michael Cunningham