Jeff Carlson, in addition to being a fine writer, (and also a contributing editor of PalmPower magazine), is the managing editor for Adam Engst's TidBITS publication (at http://tidbits.com). [TidBITS is one of the oldest electronic publications, and in the opinion of PalmPower's editors, one of the very, very best. We love their stuff. You should check it out. --DG] In addition, Calson maintains the delightfully, insightfully titled domain http://www.necoffee.com, which stands for Never Enough Coffee.

One of the aspects which distinguishes the Carlson book is that Jeff provides excellent treatment of the Mac side of things, and he manages to do this without lapsing into the kind of messianic fervor that sometimes see from some Macintosh devotees.

Official Bob Rant: OK, so it took Apple an entire month to finally replace my hard drive twice and a system board once on my new iMac, the one I had called them about with suspicions about the hardware from day one of ownership. This delayed my review of BrainForest and other work, and made me cranky. I'm not bitter, just chastened by the experience.

Whew! Okay, let's take a breath. Now, back to Jeff's great book…

It's hard to say if it is a plus or minus, but The Palm III and PalmPilot Visual QuickStart Guide is a software-free book. In other words, there is no CD of software added in to bloat the price. Since Palm device programs are so small, downloading them is not a major deal. The links page at http://beta.peachpit.com/vqs/K5847/links.html has a link to each software program mentioned in the book. Of course, if you are reading this in PalmPower, I'm sure it is a non-issue because you no doubt know how to get yourself to PalmPilot Gear (at http://pilotgear.com), Palm Central (at http://www.palmcentral.com) or the very cool EuroCool site (at http://www.eurocool.com).

Newcomers and those lacking net savvy will perhaps be encouraged to log onto one of the popular software archive sites and see what's available. You will not, however, have the gratification of an instant software fix that just dropping a CD into a drive provides.

One more tip: Chapter fourteen, ostensibly a chapter about time management software, is actually a short treatise on how to get control of your time and your life. Highly recommended.

This month's column is dedicated to the memory of Emilio Alonso, a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. Godspeed.

Stu Slack is a development engineer at The Windward Group. You can contact Stu by writing to slack@wwg.com. You can learn more about Windward at http://www.wwg.com, or by writing to info@wwg.com.