These mating manuals for the terminally online offer some unexpected benefits. Love Bytes: The Online Dating Handbook by David Fox actually contains handy advice for those who are still learning how to manage their e-mail or work a BBS. Few Web browsers (of the human variety) will seek such advice from these books, but Love Online by Phyllis Phlegar and Erotic Connections by Billy Wildhack are amusing gifts for technical virgins who find other computer manuals uninspiring. From a sexual angle, advice that makes sense in this realm is equally valuable offline. As Jackie Collins could tell you, the Internet is full of married men -- and with quite a few hi-tech Lotharios who are single but merely looking for a free thrill. Love Bytes and Erotic Connections both advise women to be prepared for some degree of harassment and deception, and they offer practical suggestions that more women should follow offline, too.

Love Online also explores sticky emotional problems associated with electronic sex. For example: You think you've done something special and intimate with another user -- then you run into him (or her) in the hot chat room. Is your cyber-someone screwing around on you? (Unfortunately, there are no tips on how to successfully parry your accused party's inevitable retort: And what were you doing in the hot chat room?). The author of Modem Love doesn't get involved in these petty squabbles because cybersex -- when "practiced properly " -- is "pure animal sex," he explains. Unlike other such manuals, Modem Love isn't necessarily aimed at the single or the lonely. Modem Love, written by a good-natured, electronic roué, offers advice to the married-but-restless on how to seek diversion while maintaining stability at home. If a married friend has been making unwanted overtures, and you are looking for a pleasant way to say: "Not really," this might be the friendly alternative.

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