Letters & mailing Book

A provocative title, and it has a dose of truth to it, but it really isn't for hackers. It's just a very solid resource book for getting the most out of Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1. Yeah, I mean the old, old 3.1, pre-Windows 95. The Windows nobody uses anymore unless you're really nostalgic or something.

This is a comprehensive reference document, laid out in kind of a dictionary format--of the underlying keywords and commands of WordBasic, the precursor of what we now know as VBA, Visual Basic for Applications.

Leonhard opens the book by getting the reader's feet wet with a number of customizations for Word 6.0, stuff like custom em dashes, paragraph formats and dialog boxes . . . stuff that I imagine is still applicable in today's VBA. When I got my first Windows laptop and was just getting into Word, this was the tool that really got me under the hood of Word. Some of those methods and ways of thinking I still use today in my career, all these years later.

Our family moved recently to a new house, and I had to part with most of my computer books from the 90s. But I told my wife to hold out the one book I wanted most out of all of them--my copy of The Hacker's Guide to Word for Windows. Out of all those twenty-year-old books, this one has held up the longest.