The Road Ahead, by Bill Gates (Penguin, £7.99 in UK)

Thank goodness for Bill Gates. Not content with taking the terror out of technology for an entire generation of computer cowards (like me), he is resolved - with a zeal which borders on the messianic - to explain the inexplicable into the bargain. So here he is on the Internet and its implications, busily painting a picture of a future which is considerably more cheery than the desolate urban disaster we have been steeled to expect from films like Blade Runner. In the process, he tells you everything you wanted to know about computing but were afraid to ask, like, yes, how do binary numbers actually work, and what will the Internet do for me, and will everybody really have a television which is also a telephone and will do the shopping and make restaurant reservations and deliver your customised newspaper to your bedside every day together with a glass of freshly-pressed apple juice? What he doesn't tell you, of course, is how in God's name you're going to pay the wretched phone bills.