Inside the World Wide Web

COMPUTER BOOK REVIEW  

511 words

Title: Inside the World Wide Web;  
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Rob Tidrow, 
Loren Buhle, Jason Kuffer, and Joel Taylor; 
New Riders Publishing; ISBN: 1-56205-412-0; 
soft cover, 1030 pages, includes CD; 
US$40.00, CAN$54.95

Reviewer: A. T. Connellan, "By the last page 
of this book there are few who will feel that they 
haven't received full bang for the buck." 

Finding Your Way on the World Wide Web

This is another one of those "Inside" books 
from New Riders Publishing, designed to 
give us everything we need to know about 
a subject, and then some. The authorial team 
of five highly-qualified specialists is supported 
by a solid back-up squad that is the trademark 
of these exhaustive "what about and how to" manuals.    
                                                           

The World Wide Web is a fun-to-use service that 
gives us the freedom to leapfrog from resource 
to resource on the Internet using linkages. Only 
three years up and running the 'Web has attracted 
intense interest, and is credited with bringing the 
commercial sector online at warp speed. 

Business quickly realized that this wondrous 
communications tool would allow them to place 
their goods and services before the entire world 
as never before. Every vendor, regardless of size, 
could now join the Internet's marketplace on an 
equal footing with all of the other buyers and sellers. 

For example, the editor of the print media in which 
you are reading this review, received it via e-mail, 
or down loaded it from my Web Site. The one that 
you may be looking at right now. 

"Inside the World Wide Web" assumes that the 
reader has a reasonable level of knowledge and 
an insatiable thirst to know more about the subject. 
Based on this, the book and accompanying 
CD-ROM teaches us how well the 'Web works and 
how we can use it to enhance our endeavors. 

While the book's size may be intimidating, its content 
is so well organized and presented that, rather than 
being overwhelmed, the reader is smoothly carried 
through an unfolding sequence of 29 chapters in 
eight sections. 

Each chapter begins with specific objectives, has 
icon-identified "Notes," and clear, legible screen 
reproductions. There are exhaustive lists and 
examples of resources and tools to illustrate and 
enlarge the how-to sections. Most important of all, 
the reader is given the opportunity to work through 
the exercises that lead to confident understanding.

This judgement base enables a rational measuring 
of how and why one might exercise the option to join 
the WWW marketplace. The bonus is that the reader 
may then, either set up a homepage, or intelligently 
oversee the project.

The CD-ROM is as valuable as the book itself. There 
is a cross-section of Web-related software utilities 
including Acrobat, which while it doesn't marry PC  
to Mac, it certainly initiates a swell affair.

The finely detailed index is a big help, but one minor 
cavil, a glossary would have been nice! 

As for "Inside the World Wide Web's" value? By the 
last page there are few who will feel that they haven't 
received full bang for the buck.