Customer Reviews

1001 Really Cool Web Sites

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New to the Web and looking for some direction in finding sites that are interesting and informative in a sea of thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites...most with addresses unknown, I bought the Renehan book. Noting that the book was published in 1995, I assumed it must be updated at least semi-annually. Though new to the Wed I was aware that there is an enormous turnover of failing, marginal and poorly conceived sites. I assumed ,therefore, that an author would find a way to keep his/her book reasonably contemperaneous. That was sadly not the case with the book being reviewed. Of the first twenty sites randomly chosen from the attractiveness of their titles, fifteen were "withdrawn","no such title" or "unknown". In further review of titles the record became somewhat better but never exceeded roughly 50% of sites listed and described in detail in the book. I then looked to the publisher's page for evidence of revisions after the 1995 publishing date and found none--absolutely none. Maybe I'm naive in thinking that such a book could be kept up-to-date in this fast moving business, but certainly something better than no changes in four years could have been done-or the book abandoned in fear of misleading naive (or otherwise unknowing) purchasers.

Yes, these websites from 1995 are long gone. But this book should be called "1001 Really Cool Web Screenshots." Since it includes an image of every site listed (granted, in black & white), it serves as an excellent thumbnail index of web aesthetics circa 1994-95, before the Way Back Machine started indexing pages.