BKINTPRM.RVW 940607 Mecklermedia 11 Ferry Lane West Westport, CT 06880 "Internet Primer", Lawley/Summerhill, 1993, 0-88736-831-X, U$29.95/C$37.50 craig@cri.org A primer is supposed to be a short introduction to a topic, and does not need to go into a lot of depth. Generally, a primer is intended for a naive audience. In some cases, however, an audience can be specified, as is the case with this book, and then one expects the material to start at a somewhat higher level of sophistication. Therefore, it may come as a shock to information professionals to learn, around about chapter three, that the authors intended all along to address the "Key-Pressing End User". (One's confidence in the level of the book is not bolstered by the authors' admission, immediately thereafter, that they are, themselves, "end users without formal technical training.") Chapter one defines the Internet in, as is becoming all too common, historical, contractual and legislative terms, rather than technical or functional ones. It is also highly US-centric, as is the list of Internet providers in chapter two which purports to be an overview of current networks. (The "currency" is questionable as well: the public access UNIX list is supposed to date from December of 1991, which is old enough, but contains listings of sites dead almost a year before that date.) Chapter three contains discussions of levels of connectivity, text file formats and data compression which are great for the novice user. Dealing with technical concepts as it does, though, it also demonstrates the greatest concentration of fundamental conceptual errors I can recall seeing in one place. These mistakes are not just implied by a rather silly example of the mail being delivered by packet switch methods, but are made outright in statements that packet-switching has no value in low speed connections. The Internet RFC (Request For Comments) process of distributed work is described in traditional and very formal terms. The client/server model is stated to be "more sophisticated" than SMTP, ftp and telnet--all of which use and rely on client/server. The numeric IP addresses are described as "four octets separated by a single period" and ranging from, "1.1.1.1 (1x8) through 256.256.256.256 (32x8)," which is not only incorrect, but completely incomprehensible. Perhaps the less said about the coverage of Kermit, OSI, UUCP, and so forth, the better. Even the "good bits" suffer at times: the section on text file formats dwells excessively on EBCDIC, and the section on "binary to text" conversions refers solely to the Mac BinHex format, rather than the more common unencode. (Later on one finds that the only desktop client software mentioned is for the Macintosh. Shall we guess what computers the authors have?) Chapter four, on applications, is much better. While brief, and missing a conceptual framework, the descriptions nevertheless manage to provide some practical detail without getting bogged down in program specific minutiae. The authors miss the distinction between "moderating" and "digesting" a mailing list, and advise looking at "smileys" at a 45 degree angle. (To be fair, this last could be more due to mathematical, than network, ignorance.) The list of network resources in chapter five is well chosen. Chapter six, however, entitled "Policy Issues," while it does cover some interesting ground, appears to be more of a long editorial going ... nowhere. Mecklermedia has made a strong push to be a major publisher on Internet topics, both in terms of books and serial publications. Their production of a book of this dubious quality is therefore odd. There are interesting points, particularly for the network trainer. This should not, however, be a "sole source" book, *particularly* for the information professional. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKINTPRM.RVW 940607 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag