Slashdot Mirror
Online! The Book
If only John C. Dvorak and Chris Pirillo (with Wendy Taylor) had been able to deliver. If only they had not strewn the book with error, verbiage and irrelavancy. Ah, well.
This volume in its 700 pages (divided into 28 chapters) tries to cover everything from hardware basics to voice over IP, in between touching on e-commerce, security, web programming, networking, content management and business websites, to name just six of the topics perhaps each better suited to a volume of their own.
This book skims, and skims fast, over a number of important and vital topics while dwelling on others that many will find useless. Chris Pirillo seems to be an expert on marketing, so that gets thirty pages, while web programming languages get ten. We get forty pages of 'Hardware Basics,' which cover information vital to getting online such as operating systems, varieties of Intel chips, video cards and gaming audio drivers. I know that if I wanted to find the perfect spot to put breakout boxes about Babbage and von Neumann (essential to any book about getting online) I'd put them in the chapter on viruses. It seems as if the three authors said "we're contracted to seven hundred pages so let's just throw in topics we know a lot about until we get to seven hundred pages -- then stop."
Then there are the errors. We get editing errors like the text that tells us a 'geostationary satellite' orbits at 'about 22,300 miles,' next to a diagram showing the number 20,300 miles. We get errors in logic like the breakout box that has "DNS servers may run Apache, which is an open source Web server program" and goes on to imply that all DNS servers will run a web server. We get errors in grammar. We get paragraphs like "Although there are dynamic Web page URLs (meaning they change, or at least part of it does), most are static (stay the same). These can be dynamic by use of a programming error or dynamic because someone named the URL extension without adding a link elsewhere on the web site." With sentence construction like that I'm still not sure if the claim intended is true or not.
Did I like anything about this book? Sure, the chapter on 'How A Modem (Really) Works' was full of good solid information. Other chapters were similar, particularly the two following on networking and handhelds, phones and PDAs. Others did contain some good information, just surrounded by dross.
You can go to the book's website, which is basically just a single page with yet more hyperbole ("Everything is here. Well-written. Comprehensive.") or visit the Prentice Hall page, which actually gives you a table of contents and a sample chapter. Just don't go straight to the Prentice Hall PTR home page and search for books with "Online" in the title, as that won't find it. Instead search for books with "Book" in the title.
I'd only recommend this book to those who want to spend a lot of time finding the good bits, a few minutes chuckling over some of the errors, and thirty dollars on a paperweight. If you're really looking for a 'perfect gift' for people new new to the net, then find something cheaper covering just the essentials, and for those more expert, find a volume that actually covers a topic of interest well.
You can purchase Online! The Book from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Gee, and it's just out in time for Christmas. What a coincidence. No wonder they didn't have time to get their facts straight, December was coming.
Trolling is a art,
It's Dvorak we're talking about here. The guy's too busy writing his Trolltech columns to actually learn anything new. I mean, thanks for explaining how a modem (really) works, guys. The 90's called -- they want their chapter back.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
licet differant, aequabitur
I think I'll wait for the movie adaptation of the book.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
but I really love his keyboards.
If every chapter has information about the internet and technology, I guess the table of contents sould be titled "Slashdot" :)
When I first saw it, I thought it was some attempt to be a hard copy of the internet.
*remembers Dilbert boss joke.*
Heh heh...
Merchandising, merchandising! Online! The Book, Online! The Movie, Online! The Breakfast Cereal... Online! The Flamethrower! (The kids love that one.)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
A 3? I think the Slashdot Universe is going to implode! Run for your lives!!!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Junk, all in one books like this have always been quite common. It seems that computers have been around long enough that even the completely uninitiated know that computing is reasonably complicated. Do they try to sell "the only book you'll ever need" style books for business? Construction? Medicine? Maybe they don't feel there are quite enough fearful dupes to be had in those topics.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is light on any real technical details. John C. Dvorak, although obviously a pretty astute individual, has been part of PC Magazine or some other end-user (i.e. barely technical) related publication for quite some time. Although I have found some of his positions on technical and business ethics of interest, his technically oriented editorial contributions have typically been geared for the person who is just getting into understanding a PC, certainly not people in the /. community.
Now I don't have to keep paying those damn ISP fees every month. I can just buy the book. What? You mean they haven't just printed out the internet? Crap!
Celebrities are like ads, if we all ignore them, they'll just go away.
What a way to introduce someone to the World Wide Wow!
I'll just wait for Online for Dummies.
Coming soon from PTR:
Offline! Tales of slashdotting
Spelling! Secrets of the Slashdot editors
"news for nerds, stuff that matters"
1999 called, they want their book back.
What does it cost? What I really mean is, can we get the book, online? :P
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
On sale for $2.99 by mid March 2004
... who's been predicting the imminent death of Apple for 20+ years.
And now he claims "...no more junk email"
OK. That's quite simply not possible, and he must know it.
"Packed with secrets never before revealed"
You're telling me there's a lot (wnough to "pack" a book this size) important useful things about the internet that only these three people knew until now?
Hogwash.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
But I thought geostationary satellites are at an elevation of about 22,239 miles. It is important to get this right, otherwise your geostationary satellite isn't stationary.
Both figures in the book are wrong.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
...."If only they had not strewn the book with error, verbiage and irrelavancy."....
Hmm... sounds exactly like being online.
...that one of the book's authors is the same one who tried to inflict the (in)famous "Dvorak Keyboard" on an unsuspecting world, the fact that the book itself is full of errors comes as no surprise whatsoever.
Heck, Dvorak probably wrote his portion on one of his goofball keyboards...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Where is Ed Kroll when you need him?
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
Oh come on. The /. editors get enough slack for always posting rah-rah reviews. Now you wanna give them slack for posting a negative review? Pfft. Variety is good. It is nice to get opinions on what is great, and what might look good, but actually sucks.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
So, I guess this will shut up the morons who complain that every Slashdot review is positive...
(since this is a comment about comments, but on-topic because it's about reviews, does this count as a "metacomment"? My guess is I'm just an ass...)
Too bad timothy's father (some drunk guy at a 70s orgy) didn't hold it back.
what? no e-book format?
Runnin' On Empty
"Slack" is good. I think you meant to say "flack." Slashdot gets flack for posting too many positive reviews.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
goatse.cx link warning! please don't click if you're at work!
...i dont trust anyone who uses so many bevels, saturated colours and drop shadows on their site, so i wont be buying this book
Instead, click here.
They're all the same reviews over and over again. All the more reason to think less of this book.
What a shame, when I first came upon Chris Pirillo a few years ago I found him to be a good resource, especially for newbies. Over time though he has lost his focus entirely. His newsletters have become useless.
As he has expanded his "empire" he has come to expect people to write for him for free. He's lost two very good Linux Writers over the past year.
I think the Dot boom went to his head and his brains went Kaboom.
It doesn't mention that one time, I did that thing, and my friend deleted it, then I uploaded it again, and he deleted it again, then I transfered some bytes, and disconnected?!?!?
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
They're all the same reviews over and over again.
Yes, but zontroll needs a thinly-veiled excuse to flog his affiliate links. I've come to find some small amount fo comfort in his endless spamming.
I always thought those "white pages" and "yellow pages" Internet directory books were funny. With the ever-so-changing web, you would end up with a book containing a bunch of URLs to nonexistant pages within a few months. Why bother with such a book when a search engine would do?
Oh yeah, marketing. Of course, you could just make annual editions of internet "yellow pages" with corrected links, etc.
It's like going to the mailbox outside the post office to mail a letter.
On the contrary, you'd think that someone would have noticed that this is the same post that this moron keeps posting in every single book review, and moderated it down into oblivion. Way to leech those sponsor dollars, spammer.
According to his webblog, in the last few months, this poor bugger got his ass fired from TechTV, only to be replaced by the uber-knowledgeable (*snicker*) Leo Laporte; gotten sick; gotten food poisoning; has a conspiracy theory that Doc Searls is actually Colonel Sanders; has a beef with hydrogenated oils in soda crackers; has sunk to the oh-so pathetic level of doodling on his own body in order to get hits to his website, "C:\PIRILLO.EXE -- Getting Screwed While Everybody Else is Getting Laid".
And to top it all off, he writes a newsletter called "Windows Fanatics". I feel so bad for this guy. World Vision should add this guy to their client list, he's at least as pathetic as the starving AIDS-ridden African child with flies crawling on his face.
BSD isn't dying, this guy is.
Maybe they are trying to mimic the rise and fall 1999-2000. You know when people still thought they would make their fortune on the internet.
If there's one thing I know about computers and the internet, it's that fluff is a very big part of it's culture. Also, Pr0n is a very big part of the internet and computers, fluffing is even more pronounced by this.
I feel that by your review you have exposed the book to be far more accurate in delivery then it ever could dream to be in content.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
This book is as perfect for every computer user as the 'Internet Yellow Pages' are. HMM, lets make a BOOK out of PAPER that lists all the websites we can find. Brilliant. These books are for people who always say,
'One of these days, you are going to have to teach me how to use computers'.
No, I won't.
Teach yourself or find something else to do. Writing a book like this is obviously going to make the authors and publishers some money, which is the point. This book was written by 'internet experts', the kind of people who get fired as soon as their companies find out how useless they really are. Then they get hired to write about what they barely know.
TallGreen CMS hosting
I mean really, there should be a competition to find a book which sets new lows.
What's the point of having a scale of 1 to 10 if nobody has a 1?
If Dvorak put out a book with so little value that it's not worth reading, will mislead anyone who doesn't know any better, would corrupt young minds if given to a library, would shame you to admit to have read it, much less purchased it, invokes sadness to look upon -- knowing that trees died to print it, leads you to question the sanity of the publisher or the motives of the author, then by all means, give it a 1!
...if you purchase a first edition book with spelling mistakes (particularly if you can get the authors to sign it), it will be worth more in proportion to the evidently etherous value of it's contents.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I think it's already out, it's called "Hackers."
editing errors like the text that tells us a 'geostationary satellite' orbits at 'about 22,300 miles,' next to a diagram showing the number 20,300 miles.
"Geostationary orbit" seems like a misnomer itself. If it's geostationary, is it really orbiting around anything besides the sun?
I like how to the book site says,
Packed with secrets never before revealed
Gee, what secrets were these? I didn't realize the Internet had secrets. Maybe they're in a secret RFC somewhere that nobody knows about. Well, thank goodness for this book!
Er. I could pretend English is my second language... but I have no excuse. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
it's not my fault sites copy and paste each other's reviews
it's not my fault sites copy and paste each other's reviews
So what you're saying is that you don't read the reviews to verify if they're different, you just link to them so that you can attach your affiliate links to them. That's a great help. Certainly justifies your spam.
Well,
.. and I'll look forward to reading the review.
It sounds like you just got yourself an itch to scratch.
Get to it
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
actually, what happened in this case is that each of those 3 sites had one review and then all of a sudden all 3 of them had all 3 reviews. I can't do anything about the fact that they updated them after I linked to them.
They left out blinking text and scrolling banners.
/. abuse.
BTW, the "Early Comments" section is just BEGGING for
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"Hmm... sounds exactly like being online."
To sound exactly like being online it would have to include hardcore photos of the authors and ads for penis enlargement.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm sure Dvorak is an idiot on topics other than the Apple, but those are the examples of idiocy that come most readily to mind.
- Crow T. Robot
Seems sort of ironic that they would have a website online for a book about computer and internet basics. It should have a message like those bumper stickers, "If you can read this you don't need this book".
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I don't have time to read all that. When will the Cliff's Notes version be out?
120 comments and nobody has written a compare/contrast piece between Online! The Book! and Cannibal! The Musical! yet?
This can't be slashdot.
...and it may never be. I still help out at a dial-up ISP that's been open for business since 1989. We're a local mom and pop shop.
We have a lot of customers. There's seniors who don't do anything but email, so our "PAYING" rate works well, at $5 for 20 hours of connection time, tracked by the second. (Who'd have thought $5 could last you six months?) Then there's joe and jane parent who don't want their kid on Kazaa all the time.
All in all, dial-up still fills a niche. The low-bandwidth, low-cost niche. That's not going to be satisfied until there's datacount-based wireless service.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
... Imminent releases from the same author include "Stuff" and "Things," and he is currently working on "Whatyamacallit."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
In Soviet Ru$$ia, a Beowulf cluster of "it is now official, a Netcraft survey confirms: all your BSD are dying" IMAGINES YOU!!!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Maybe you meant Silence! ?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
(probably) from Dvork's classic guide to PC Telecommunications, a mainstay back in the days of BBSs.
Sad.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
That's the evil, mind-ripping beauty of the Free Internet. Be careful where you click.
While this is an example of a page with a sidebar.
This is only worth commenting on because I had no idea what the hell you meant.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Count me as one AC who (for the obvious reason that I don't want to embarass myself in public) thinks Chris is lots cuter than Gretchen.
This book sounds like the equivalent of some music artist putting out an album full of filler just to fulfill a contractual obligation. Is that what's going on here -- Dvorak has a contract with Prentice-Hall that says he has to write n books in x years?
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
ugh.
He's the retarded Andy Rooney of computer journalism.
- learn to swim.
new arrangements of you come up.
Now why wasn't that one in the Rapier Wit webpage?
I clicked through to the book's website. ACK! I think I'm pernanently blind! I haven't seen something that ugly since my 5 year old niece made a web page about her puppies.
Nah, the puppy page was better.
*shivers* Oh my Lord, that was scary.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
On the hubr-o-meter, this does not quite measure up to O'Reilly publishing a book The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog.
Admittedly, they published it in 1992...
1999 called, they want their "In Soviet Ru$$ia, a Beowulf cluster of 'it is now official, a Netcraft survey confirms: all your BSD are dying' IMAGINES YOU!!" back... I, for one, welcome our new 1999 joke-taking-back overlords.
[i]We get errors in logic like the breakout box that has "DNS servers [b]may[/b] run Apache, which is an open source Web server program" and goes on to imply that all DNS servers will run a web server.[/i] Since when does [i]may[/i] mean [i]must[/i]?
Give JPL a kiss for me, luv.
Janez Pavel gunna get fucked up da ASS!!!
Goatse.cx ...as the man bent over, he grabbed the sides of his anus and....
you get the idea.
"This may be the single most important book ever written fro people who go online and for people who want to go online." (From the book's website Lies. All lies.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
Sheesh, this Slashdot entry is nothing more than incoherent babble. I had to read through it three times to understand exactly what the point was -- and I'm *still* not entirely sure I get it. You have a problem with him "doodling on his own body," I take it? Why care? Did seeing his bare nipples give you an erection and put your sexuality in question?
Good gawd, man. Get out of the basement and do something constructive already.
Fuck you vlaggot.