Monday night I went to my first meeting of the Neon Guild, an association of local Charlottesville technology professionals. (Web designers seemed to dominate, perhaps due to the theme of this month’s meeting.) I learned something very valuable about web design: that free, open source CSS stylesheets are available at Open Web Design.

My first book was a crash course in basic end user tasks for using the MVS, VM/CMS, OS/400, VMS, and Unix operating systems: logging in, navigating the file system, using e-mail, using the text editor, listing, creating, and deleting files, and so forth. I wanted to call it “Fake Your Way Through Minis and Mainframes” but the McGraw-Hill Professional Book Division decided that “The Operating Systems Handbook” sounded more, well, professional, especially for a $49.50…