Where words can weave their web
Oxford English Dictionary website Networks £400 - £1,000 yearly, individuals £350
Till only a few months ago, dictionaries and encyclopaedias for real grown-ups were hard to find on the web. Then, Encyclopaedia Britannica went online free. It now gets 17 million hits a month. What Britannica did to the inferior Encarta encyclopaedia - Microsoft has just begun giving it away if you buy £57 family Millennium Dome tickets - the new Oxford English Dictionary website should do to Scrabble and crosswords.

The subscription rates look off-putting. If you're purely an individual user, you'd be better off sticking with the best of existing free dictionaries on www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html or looking for a cut-price deal on the £250 CD-rom. But otherwise this instantly updateable website should make the OED far more accessible at work, at home and in leisure if you can get hold of a corporate, educational or public library log-on - allowing unlimited users and usage - than it has been in 20 arm-breaking book volumes at £1,800 a throw.

What you get is the world's most admired dictionary, the richest of guides to the glories of the language as well as to its meanings. The site is elegant, image-free and lucidly signposted with a range of handsome fonts. You can get it to solve blank letters in clues, using wild cards: with 60 million words, it can't really fail to know the answer. Or you can look up how often John Lennon or the Guardian are cited as sources for word usages. The answer, one notes modestly, is Lennon 16, the Guardian 6,529. Free tour at www.oed.com. (JE)

Growing up with networks
Bay Networks' Netgear Network Starter Kit, Model EB104 £49.99 from PC World Cabling supplied is standard UTP, with a four-port, 10BASE-T Ethernet Hub.
A lot of people will have added a further PC to their collection recently. Perhaps the pressure on a single machine became too great because homework always took precedence, or the accounts package could not run while someone else was preparing mailing lists.

A second machine quickly resolves these conflicts but new bottlenecks appear. Which machine has the dedicated printer? The request: "Can you save your work for a moment while I do a quick print?" becomes all too familiar and frustrations begin again. The overwhelming temptation to rush out and buy another printer should be resisted. There's a much more efficient and cost effective alternative available.

Small networking solutions have become widely available over the past few months and it's possible to buy a starter kit that can link up to four PCs and share devices such as printers for under £50. I chose the Netgear Network Starter Kit which comes with all you need to link two PCs initially, including a four-port hub, network cards for the PCs, cables and software.

The hub is a surprise to people used to cabinets the size of coffee machines. It stands about an inch high with a "footprint" as big as a floppy disk. Four ports are available to connect PCs on the network, but if you need more capacity later, one port can be used to daisy-chain hubs together. The network runs at up to 10 megabits per second, enough bandwidth for most home or small business applications.

Installing the hardware and software is very easy. Each PC needs Windows 95 or 98 and a spare ISA expansion slot for the network card. Going "inside the box" to do this carries the usual caveats. Disconnect the electrical supply before opening the PC and avoid damaging the cards by touching an earthed metallic object to discharge any static.

When power is restored, Windows immediately recognises the new hardware and with the software provided with the kit, quickly installs a driver for the card. All that remains is to name each computer and the network.

Adding file and printer sharing for Microsoft Networks from the network option in the control panel completes the job. If things do go wrong, the Network Troubleshooter in Windows Help is especially good.

Any files to be shared across the network must be placed in shared folders. Clicking on the folder with the mouse's right-button reveals the "Sharing" option and such folders can be fully shared, read-only or password protected.

Floppy drives, CD and hard drives are shared in the same way. As applications such as word processors on one PC can be opened and run by any other on the network. Printer sharing is a little different but easily achieved using the "Add printer wizard" in Windows.

If you bought a printer with a network card installed, you're away, as it can be connected immediately to the network hub.

The full power of this approach only becomes apparent as all of the possibilities are explored, but enormous advantages are achieved for less than the cost of adding another printer.

But be sure to designate yourself as network manager. Any problems with the kids or your business partner and you can threaten removal of all access privileges! (KB)

Big Blue keeps its business secrets
IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade By Doug Garr, John Wiley £17.99
IBM is still the world's biggest computer company, with more than four times Microsoft's turnover and around 10 times the number of staff. It also used to be the world's most profitable corporation, but in 1993, it was better known for making the world's biggest losses: $8bn in one year, $16bn over three years. Big Blue was desperate, and hired an outsider, Louis V Gerstner Jr, to turn things around. The former McKinsey & Co consultant succeeded beyond most people's expectations, and has taken the company's share price from an all-time low to an all-time high. It would be fascinating to know how he did it, besides spending $25bn on stock buybacks, but IBM Redux doesn't really explain.

Partly this is Gerstner's fault, and partly IBM's. Gerstner didn't even give Garr - a former IBM speechwriter - an interview, and the company provided only minimal help. Garr does have some good accounts of things like, for example, the dramatic change in IBM's advertising, but Gerstner never emerges as a real presence. Nor is this a business casebook. Garr does not provide enough details of IBM's financial performance, and he does not analyse the workings of its numerous divisions. There are no tables, charts or graphs.

If Gerstner really has effected "the business turnaround of the decade", surely there should be something spectacular to discuss. But there isn't. Most of IBM's divisions are still churning out dull products that are going nowhere fast, with most of the growth coming from a services business of questionable profitability. And although services now bring in a third of IBM's $87.5bn revenues, Garr barely pays them a glance. IBM Redux is a useful and readable book, and it highlights the characters of several members of King Louis' court. But exactly how Gerstner earned the $500m he could make from turning round the Big Blue battleship remains a mystery. (JS)

Programming Applications with WAP By Steven Mann, Wiley, £32.50
If you are tired of waiting for WAP (wireless application protocol) phones to become available, you could do worse than gen up on the programming language that lies behind it. Tens of thousands of experts are trying to work out killer applications for internet phones which are likely to be one of the biggest selling consumer products of the decade. But there is no reason why you can't try to make some of your own programs if only because the small size of screens on the phone means that programming is inevitably less complicated than on the web itself.

This book is primarily aimed at application developers but is written in a way that is accessible to ordinary human beings. Once you have typed in a simple seven-line program to produce a simple phrase on screen, it at least serves to demystify the subject. Mobile phones are about to bring the internet to a mass market. There's no reason why they shouldn't bring programming to the people as well. This won't be the book that does that, but it is a good place to start learning what it is all about. (VK)