Customer Reviews

Downloaded: The Third Collection of the 5th Wave

This book has no introduction, afterward, or anything except various strips of _The Fifth Wave_, probably familiar to more readers as the cartoons appearing in the For Dummies books than as ComputerWorld magazine's most popular feature. :) Some of the strips have previously appeared in various For Dummies books, but since there are more than 200 strips in this book, that shouldn't be a problem.

The strips cover all sorts of 'technical' topics, from using a snake charmer to try to retrieve a lost file to 'Linux poker'. ("Everyone gets to see everyone else's cards, everything's wild, you can play off your opponents' ands, and everyone wins except Bill Gates, whose face appears on the Jokers.") Tarzan, Lord of the Web makes a couple of appearances ("Lord of the Jungle - where future in that?"), although Buddy Diskk, Computer Comedian does not. (Tennant doesn't even need to crack many AOL jokes, let alone use a comedian character.) We have a few visits to MousePad Land.

Lots of these strips feature kids, especially kids in school and the teachers coping with them, from the teacher who failed an algebra student but liked the kid's animated equations to the teacher who assigned the kids to search for discount vacation airfares. Parents get their fair share too: the couple concerned that their kid can't hot-key from app to app as well as the other kids; the parent who won't buy an ISDN line; the father who installed a vibrating pager in the kids' bunks; the dad who pepped up his ghost stories with multimedia. Some of the kids run roadside stands selling internet access, while others call 911 while the rest of the family is trapped in a computer-game dungeon.

Some non-techie topics are included too, such as the security-conscious 'cube farm' with guards on horseback; experimental alternatives to pie charts; using a wild rhino to test the disaster recovery plan; and people who think 'working with the kernel all day' involves KFC.