Once upon a time last March, or thereabouts, if you wanted to start using the Internet, you found a serious bookstore and picked up one of three or four how-to books. Today, you can pop into any Waldenbooks and find scads to choose from - all of which seem to have been published in a dreadful hurry. Here is a sample of this crushing wave:
Apparent mission: Teach Windows PC users how to get their machine configured as a node on the Net and what to do next.
Irritating feature: Annoyingly lighthearted; contains irrelevant cartoons.
Sample quote: "Since our last edition, the Internet has been growing, like, well something that grows really fast" (page 276).
Shocking omission: The chapter on Internet Relay Chat coyly avoids mentioning why it is that there are so many Net channels with monikers like #wetsex.
Apparent mission: Introduce the Net to newish users with moderately long attention spans; promote the author's quarterly newsletter.
Irritating feature: Basic - nay - fundamental techniques of Net usage (for example, telnet) are touted as "slick tricks"; it's a little overwedded to accessing the Net via Delphi.
Sample quote: "The fast-buck artists who have owned a modem for less than a week and see e-mail as the next 'marketing opportunity' are simply beneath contempt. They richly deserve every flame message fired back at them for their greed and stupidity" (page 146).
Shocking omission: There doesn't seem to be one. This is a good sign.
Apparent mission: Tap into the enormous Net-novice/hamfisted-detective-novel-parody market.
Irritating feature: Mystery story framework plus subpar editing produces sketchy instructions, and lame puns ("Archie Finger, Private Eye").
Sample quote: "It's a lot like e-mail, with one big catch: when somebody sends out an article on a topic, it goes out to almost everyone, unlike e-mail, which goes to a particular user only" (page 16).
Shocking omission: So little information is to be found in this slender book that no omission would be too shocking.
Apparent mission: Walk novices through every conceivable use of the Net while totally boring them to death.
Irritating feature: Prose reminiscent of tax-form instructions is spiced up with exciting screen dumps and text files that seem to be reprinted wholesale from all over the Net.
Sample quote: "What you will do now is send yourself an e-mail message. We will walk through the steps to create a short message. You will then send it" (page 38).
Shocking omission: This may be the only book on the Net ever published with a list of newsgroups that doesn't include a member of the alt.sex hierarchy.
Apparent mission: Expose reasonably experienced users to a heavy dose of net.weirdness.
Irritating feature: Zine-like layout and clip-art at odds with not-at-all-zine-like cover price.
Sample quote: On alt.devil.bunnies: "...really pinning it down is like using a squirt gun on a rhinoceros that isn't really there" (page 101).
Shocking omission: Completely overlooks alt.fan.lemurs.
STREET CRED
QuickCamNetscape for Serious Webheads
Surfing the Other Internet Wave
