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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.
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.
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.
I have a wonderful book by Reader's Digest (go figure)that explains how an automobile works better than any popular book on the subject I have ever seen.
Should I continue to recommend it or send a note to Reader's Digest that the 1890s called and want their book back?
KFG
John Dvorak is a professional troll. What various slashdotters only dream of, he lives. What is a troll? Someone who writes something deliberately provocative to make people angry and respond. Accuracy doesn't even show up on the list of priorities. Dvorak has figured out how to make a living as a troll. Instead of trolling in forums, he trolls in his columns and books. Even though everybody knows that what he writes is crap and has no connection with reality, it still pisses people off enough that they read it, and point it out to their friends.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
...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.
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