It's quaint that in this day of search engines to help us find more search engines, some old-fashioned reference books are still perennial sellers. When The Irwin Guide to Using The Wall Street Journal premiered in 1984, the future day traders of the world weren't trading much more than Atari cartridges. So, the advent of this sixth edition--penned, as ever, by Michael B. Lehmann, a University of San Francisco economics professor who has developed a popular seminar class around it--receives a round of well-deserved kudos.

Even if, that is, its title remains a bit of a misnomer. For this is not, nor has ever it been, so much a guide to using the WSJas it is a tidy primer on the fundamental workings of the U.S. economy and stock markets, intended not just to help readers enjoy the WSJ more, but to help them more fully comprehend what they read there. Lehmann covers just about everything, like a rigorous-but-not-draconian year of Economics 101: from how and why interest rates affect markets and when to expect the next recession to the Federal Reserve's impact on your investment portfolio and which fixed-income market is right for you. The guided tour Lehmann gives is well organized and accessible to the average financial layperson who can handle sentences slightly longer than those in USA Today and doesn't think "Federal Reserve" refers to an early 19th-century architectural style. A certain amount of patience may be called for, too: though no opaque academic text, The Irwin Guide is far from one of those Dummies/Idiots books that somehow crams the greatest matters of civilization into what generally look like coloring books for adults. Lehmann's text is dense, relieved only occasionally by various charts or articles previously published in the WSJ. Curious is the near-total absence of terms you would have expected to see in an update from the 1996 edition--terms like "Internet," "dot-com," and "WWW." But after six editions you have to think that Lehmann's a sly one--maybe he speaks most eloquently of how the current dot-com/IPO mania will play in the long term by saying absolutely nothing. --Timothy Murphy

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