DAVE BARRY IN CYBERSPACE

User-friendly Barry, tour guide to the world and elsewhere (Dave Barry Does Japan, 1992, etc.), takes a crack at cyberspace and comes up with a loony naturalist's guide to computer geekdom. To that add a survey of picturesque roadkill on the information superhighway, and you get the idea. As it happens, Hard Drive Dave knows whereof he downloads. He travels to Las Vegas for Comdex, the great annual gathering of computer nerds and zillionaires. He mentions Bill Gates often and throws several rocks toward Windows95. (Our author has learned to do that little ``'' thing with his word processor.) He has owned a score of computers, each outdated instantly and each tax- deductible. Barry's take is, as expected, pointed and funny. He provides essential history (UNIVAC, he tells us, ``weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons''), an analysis of just how the infernal devices work (they won't, judging from his presentation), instruction on installation (you can't do it) and word processing (you can do too much of it). There is a catalog of really stupid Web sites and Barry's presentation of emoticons, those cute little faces true computerniks devise to replace words, and they are equal to any currently available on the network. With all that, and disk space still available, Barry completes his manual with a full-blown computer romance worthy of a bridge in Madison County. A natural topic for a prize-winning humorist. And it can be read with zero RAM, too. (Author tour)