Date: Thu, 06 Oct 1994 14:44:02 EST From: "Rob Slade, Ed. DECrypt & ComNet, VARUG rep, 604-984-4067" Subject: "Internet Primer" 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 BKIPCHRD.RVW 940419 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Heather Rignanesi, Marketing, x340, 73171.657@Compuserve.com P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 or Tiffany Moore, Publicity tiffanym@aw.com Bob Donegon bobd@aw.com John Wait, Editor, Corporate and Professional Publishing johnw@aw.com Tom Stone, Editor, Higher Education Division tomsto@aw.com Philip Sutherland, Schulman Series 74640.2405@compuserve.com Keith Wollman, Trade Computer Group keithw@aw.com Lisa Roth Blackman, Trade Computer Group lisaro@aw.com 1 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867-9984 800-822-6339 617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 5851 Guion Road Indianapolis, IN 46254 800-447-2226 "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book", Messmer, 1994, 0-201-62426-9, U$34.95 I'm not sure about indispensable, but it certainly is exhaustive. The fact that it is just shy of a thousand pages gives you only an indication, until you see the tiny type size used here. This is not a shopper's guide to the normal level of components. You get all the facts, it is true, but it is mostly at the level of pinouts and timing diagrams. This is for programmers and hardware hackers at the circuit board level and below. An introductory chapter at a very easy and readable level leads into details of the motherboard and various levels of Intel processors through the next four. Chapters six and seven cover memory and support chips. Chapters eight and nine deal with mass storage on floppy and hard drives. Interfaces, ports, input devices and graphics adapters are detailed in chapters ten to twelve. A number of appendices bring together related information, including a brief listing of the interrupt calls. Given the broad scope of the book, I found some of the "missing" information to be odd. There is a listing of the machine instructions for the 80x86 processors--but only the mnemonics, without the actual opcodes or basic descriptions. The serial ports and UARTs are described thoroughly as to pinouts, but the onerous task of ensuring against address and IRQ conflicts is not discussed. The author insists that even beginners could read this book--and he has every right to do so. If you are interested in the hardware at this level, the explanations are clear and well sequenced. For anyone curious about any of the low level operations of the computer this is a very thorough resource. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKIPCHRD.RVW 940419 ============= Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca | "Kill all: God will know his own." Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | - originally spoken by Papal Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | Legate Bishop Arnald-Amalric User p1@CyberStore.ca | of Citeaux, at the siege of Security Canada V7K 2G6 | Beziers, 1209 AD ============= for back issues: Contacts list: cert.org, /pub/virus-l/docs/reviews CyberStore or The Cage Reviews: cert.org, /pub/virus-l/docs/reviews/pc, CyberStore or The Cage Book reviews: ftp ftp.cyberstore.ca, /pub/BookReviews x2ftp.oulo.fi, /pub/msdos/programming/books Also try contacting sanj@wordsworth.com, ibic@sunsite.unc.edu, reddj@carleton.edu, oury@technical.powells.portland.or.us, jkcohen@uci.edu or afinet@books.com, for progress reports Column: CyberStore or The Cage CyberStore: commercial, telnet cyberstore.ca or call +1-604-526-3676 The Cage: FREQ from 1:153/733 or call +1-604-261-2347