Customer Reviews

Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide (Prentice Hall Series in Innovative Technology)

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"Zen and the art of the Internet" is the first book I have seen from Brendon Keyhoe's pen, and it's a winner! Those of us who watched the computer revolution pass us by, will find lots of basic, introductory info on the internet, it's history and how to connect. He gives thoughtful, careful, complete descriptions of the various internet components, such as TCP/IP, telnet, ftp, and gopher. Looking for a quick, understandable method of composing your own web page? The appendix, alone, covers web authoring concepts in just a dozen pages or so; I've seen books (such as "HTML for Dummies") waste literally hundreds of pages with useless, technical details the average user could care less about. Need an easy to understand, yet thorough intro to net surfing? Get "Zen and the Art of the Internet"!

It's not that a bad book, just, outdated, unless you are interested in early, pre-Amazon Internet.

Although some of the command line invocations are from the primordial past of the 'net, this book still is chock full of good philosophy on how folks ought to behave on line.

Keep in mind this book was written "back in the day" when it wasn't called "the internet." In fact the internet as we know it today really didn't exist yet. There was the ARPA/DARPA network which was strictly for colleges and the defense industry to exchange data. The technology back then consisted of 9600 baud (or slower) modems and technologies like UUCP were in use.

From UUCP came some of the early news groups. Then called USENET, this was a way of allowing folks to post articles under a hierarchy of "groups" that were organized as to subject matter.

From those beginnings we now have web sites, email lists, IRC, AOL Chat, blogs, wikis and all sorts of things on the 'net.

And still and probably nowadays more importantly is the need for a code of honor or code of ethics to guide how people interact using these mediums. Hence the term "netiquette" and "netizen."

To be a good netizen you practiced good netiquette in all your dealings on the 'net.

This book is all about those concepts and what is considered good and what is considered bad. There is a recognition of the effects of the anonyminity of posting using "handles" instead of real names and the like. Because of that anonymity some folks feel that they can say things in a manner on the 'net that they would dare say in person in public. This book addresses that and more.

In spite of its datedness in terms of the technology it speaks to it still deserves a place on every netizens bookshelf.

If you're using Amazon, you don't want this book. It's pre-Web and explores such topics as FTP etiquette and sending email from a VMS command line. Unfortunately, the rating system does not allow zero stars.