Customer Reviews

Internet 101

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This book contains a rather comprehensive introduction to the Internet for adult beginners. It was written as a college textbook, but now that 3 years have passed since the book was first published, it's hard to believe that there would still be many college students out there who are complete newcomers to the Internet. In other words, many of the topics are treated in such a basic way as to make the book too elementary for a college Internet course in this day and age. For example, Lehnert goes into great detail about how to send and reply to e-mail messages. She also devotes an entire chapter to Gophers and Veronica, which are almost a historical footnote to the Web at this point. One uncommon feature of the book is that many of her examples demonstrate how to use Internet applications on a Unix platform, which may make the book more well-suited as an introductory text on a college campus. A somewhat annoying factor is that the text contains many callout Hint boxes which, unfortunately, use a thin black sans serif font over a darkish gray background, making the hints quite difficult to read. The book includes several chapters on HTML and Web page construction; I found these chapters extremely lucid and succinct, as well as accurate. As one would expect with a textbook, each chapter includes a list of suggested problems and exercises. There is also a bibliography and index, but no glossary.

INTERNET 101 is one of the best courses around. It teaches about best web browsing by aborting a stuck download; avoiding peak hours; changing the default homepage; keeping at it even when the message is 404 [not found]; reloading web pages for updates; resetting the memory cache; turning off graphics; and using bookmarks, the find command, and the history list. It also teaches about best mailing list traffic control by turning off subscriptions during busy times and by using the digest option and a mail filter. It even teaches about best web sites, with clear titles, multiple portable pages, ongoing maintenance, and random acts of kindness to back door drop-ins. It teaches that downloads will be the best too, with <HR> tags for horizontal rules, interlaced gif images for large gif files, larger graphics at the bottom of the page, size attributes, small files for backgrounds, and thumbnail previews and other clickable graphics. So Wendy G. Lehnert's book makes Internetworld less scary, along with Peter Kent's THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET, Joe Kraynak's EASY INTERNET, Brian Underdahl's INTERNET BIBLE, and David Wall's USING THE WORLD WIDE WEB.