This is a good guide to what is for most of us a new software area. As is now usual, it comes with a CD which includes graphics software, Web utilities and the complete electronic text of the book.

Front Page is software for creating the kind of pages that you find on the Internet. A few months ago the only way of creating those pages was by learning a series of complicated codes. Now you can create pages almost as easily as you can type a page in a word processor.

All schools in the UK have been offered Front Page by Microsoft as part of its free offer to connect schools to the Internet. Those who responded to the offer will have it on the CD-Rom that came with the free copy of Windows 95. Normally this is software that has to be paid for but for the next couple of months it is free. It must be admitted at present that the creation of these pages seems to many people about as relevant as producing an illuminated manuscript. Not for long, however. Microsoft’s strategy is to link all its applications very closely with the Internet, and Microsoft’s applications are already in very many schools so these developments are important.

Do you need a book to help you learn the program? It will cut down the learning time and we are talking about important software. There are people who argue that these new kinds of pages are going to become an essential feature of our lives and you can see why.

You can gauge what Microsoft thinks of these developments. Bill Gates paid $130 million to acquire the company that developed Front Page. It is only when you have tried creating Web pages without Front Page that you realise how good it is. And this book is a good guide to this new world.

Jack Kenny * Programs have started to appear that take most of the pain out of page creation