The citizens of the future world described in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age have a number of advanced technological devices available, including matter compilers, to create whatever they need at the moment, and "mediatronic" paper, which displays each day's news on the same sheet. Yet the heroine carries with her at all times a book, which she consults constantly. Of course, the book is so technologically advanced that it would qualify as magical for us, but still it's a book.

Despite all our advances, it's almost a given that we generally prefer our technical information in printed format, rather than in a help file or other electronic document. It's much easier to curl up with a book than a laptop; it's easier on the eyes, and it's usually lighter. In addition, the new HTML-based help system Microsoft is moving to has not been universally popular.

I've always favored printed documentation myself, but I must admit that the Microsoft Office 2000 Visual Basic Language Reference gave me pause. The six volumes in this mammoth set total over 7,000 pages of documentation. A couple of the volumes weigh as much as some notebook computers.

But then these are really intended as reference volumes, not something to be read straight through. Typically, you'd have these volumes by your computer as you're writing a program, so they can be pulled out to look up a method, a property, or anything else.

Each volume is an alphabetical reference to part of the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language embedded in Office 2000 applications.

Volume 1 (1842 pages) covers Access 2000 and Office 2000 Data Access, so it details Access-specific language elements, ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), Data Access Objects (DAO), the Jet database engine, and Jet SQL. The second and third volumes treat Excel and Word, respectively, while the fourth discusses Outlook, Powerpoint and Frontpage. Volume 5 covers the VBA elements common to all Office 2000 applications, as well as the shared libraries. Finally, Volume 6 is the reference for Office Web components and Office Server extensions.

Each entry in the volumes lists a description, syntax, arguments, intrinsic constants, and comments about using the element. Numerous code examples and cross-references are included. Unfortunately, discussions of objects do not include a discussion of all the object's properties and methods, just cross-references to them.

This is a mammoth reference set, but if you make your living programming OFFICE 2000, it can be essential. I still recommend strongly the In a Nutshell books from O'Reilly & Associates reviewed here recently, and will probably use them more on a daily basis. [Note: See "SPCUG Benefits and Special Offers" for a deal on Windows 98 in a Nutshell.-Ed.] But the official reference is sometimes the only place to find that little nugget that solves a nagging problem.

The set is expensive, but substantial discounts are available from Fatbrain, Amazon and other online booksellers.

Microsoft VISUAL STUDIO Core Reference Set
Review by Tom Anderson

This five-volume set, unlike the above, contains the kind of volumes you might read through. These are the official programmer's guides for the applications in Visual Studio 6: Visual Basic, Visual Foxpro, Visual C++, Visual J++ and Visual Interdev.

Each volume follows a standard format: an introduction, a description of the steps to making an application, basic coding and the essentials of using the particular program. There's usually a guide to debugging and to error trapping and correction, and a gradually more complex guide to programming using the given tool.

There is considerably more detail, and more guidance, in these volumes than in the language references listed above. These books are intended to teach you to program using the language of each volume. They aren't complete guides, but there's far more material about, for example, using one method rather than another to achieve a result.

You should know something about programming to use these volumes, but you needn't be an expert. The books progress slowly, to allow absorption of one item before moving to the next. If you're already skilled at earlier versions of the programs involved, you might find these too elementary. But for relative beginners, they're a good way to start.

I've been known to complain that Microsoft Press books don't acknowledge the existence of other companies' products, or deal with the problems of interoperating with them. But I should also point out that Microsoft books are almost always clearly written, and remarkably free of the egregious errors in code samples that mar so many otherwise promising books.

These volumes are all available individually, but if you're working with all of Visual Studio, it's cheaper to buy the set, and cheaper still to get it online.