Customer Reviews

User's Guide to the Information Age: A Straight-Talking Guide to How Our World is Connected and How Information Shapes Our Lives

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Being a librarian for 33 years, it has been interesting and a lot of fun to have been an active participant in the "Information Age." Having "been there, done that" for much of the coverage, I find the content of this title quite dated, but still interesting to browse through and read.

The artwork, layout and design is simply fantastic. High school and middle school level readers will enjoy the humor -- illustrations of a ram's head to discuss random-access-memory; a picture of a cookie with a bite out of it for a discussion of a "byte"; an illustration of a plane crash for computer "crash"; and so forth.

I like the fact that the book is profusely illustrated as the color brings another dimension to content that, frankly, would be quite difficult to absorb as simple text. The book designers have done a good job of jazzing it up enough for users to want to pick it up and read, understand and absorb.

The author, strangely enough, is the CEO of the publishing company that produced the book and has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. While he prides himself on having written a number of books for the financial services industry and having developed "the first easy-to-read documents for the brokerage, banking, and telecommunications industries," he (and his company) would be better served by bringing in a co-author with a Ph.D. in the growing field of the History of Technology to help rewrite the text for a second, newer edition. And, I do hope they publish another edition !

R. Neil Scott
Middle Tennessee State University

The idea of this book was good, the execution poor. The information contained in the book is not always correct. As someone who works in technology, the descriptions are sometimes incorrect or misrepresented. If you are looking for a general (high level) overview then this will suffice but a defintional work with solid descriptions, I would look elsewhere.