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,
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
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.
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.
On sale for $2.99 by mid March 2004
...."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
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...)
...i dont trust anyone who uses so many bevels, saturated colours and drop shadows on their site, so i wont be buying this book
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.
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