© 1996 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 18, no. 6, November-December 1996, pp. 31-35.
An old game among English-language literati is the Game of Collectives. While Japanese does not distinguish between singular nouns and plurals, English often creates entire new words: a group of cows is a herd, a group of geese is a gaggle, etc. In the Game of Collectives, you invent new words, such as “
Enter any bookstore with a computer section and you will find tons of books devoted to the Internet. In fact, it is hard to find computer books that don’t mention the Internet; even word processing, graphics and computer games books seem to insist on some sort of Internet relevancy. Which is not quite the same as being relevant.
All the books reviewed here have something to do with the Internet, but they are divided into three categories: General (broadly based books not specific to a task, or even to the Mac), Starting Out (books for those getting their modems warm), and Internet Publishing (books for those wishing to warm up other people’s modems). Some of them have an apparent MS-DOS/ Windows/Windows 95 focus, but if you look a little deeper the real content is computer agnostic.
The impatient among you can just skip to the end. Books marked with three stars (★★★) are highly recommended.
General
One of the most useful books, especially for those involved with government, is Chris Casey’s The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age. Casey, a Washington Apple Pi member (the Pi is even mentioned in the book), was, and is, a leading proponent of linking the government to the people via computers. While working for Senator Edward Kennedy, he helped set up a computer bulletin board-based service in Massachusetts that published press releases from the Senator’s office. This very quickly became something much more, evolving into an electronic meeting place for Massachusetts voters to ask questions, comment on events, and, inevitably, argue with one another. Press coverage (including a highly laudatory article in Mac Week) made it sound as if Casey was a technical wizard, kicking Capitol Hill into the computer age with the click of a mouse.
Casey discounts this, pointing out that he is neither an expert on the Internet nor a political expert. Instead, he was simply in the right place at the right time to get something done, and the vast majority of the book is devoted to both advocating closer links between government and the people, through computers, and reviewing available and forthcoming resources. In the process, Casey manages to educate the reader about what congressional staff members do, details successful and unsuccessful attempts to use “the Net” for political and governmental ends, and offers some truly hilarious stories of misadventures, Internet-spread rumors, and the uncomfortable clash of powerful people and powerful technology. Highly recommended if you are thinking about applying computer technology for political or governmental purposes, and for those who vote. And remember: if you don’t vote, don’t complain.
Alfred Glossbrenner has two books with a more general focus, The Little Online Book and The Little Web Book. A quick look at the screen shots suggests that The Little Online Book has a PC focus, which is not at all true; Glossbrenner occasionally reveals that he knows a bit more about PCs than Macs, but on the whole the book is an excellent general introduction to reaching out through your modem to the rest of the world, and what computer you use with the modem isn’t that critical. This volume covers Internet topics, but often through the filter of a bulletin board, or a commercial on-line service (usually Delphi). Some parts of the book are definitely dated; GEnie is no more, and BITNET, a free, cooperative “Internet-like” service, has also died.
The Little Web Book, coauthored with Emily Glossbrenner, is obviously much more focused with the World Wide Web. There is a brief review of the Internet, and non-Web related Internet services (FTP, Telnet, E-mail). The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to explaining the World Wide Web, how to find things, and how the Web is constructed and how you can use this knowledge to get around. Many specific Web sites and resources are examined, in mercifully brief form. Like the previous book, all the screen shots are obviously from a Windows machine, but most of the actual content is machine neutral.
Another general book is The Underground Guide to Telecommuting, by Woody Leonhard. This volume has a very specific purpose: it details how to operate a business via telecommunications. Leonhard is extremely biased against the Mac, so ignore those parts; the real value of the book is not his questionable tastes in hardware and software, but information on the economic benefits of doing business from home, the hows and whys of setting up an electronic presence through computer generated faxes and E-mail, the elements of a modern electronic office (from furniture and equipment to habits: smoking is bad for you and your electronics), implications of tax law, and even the evolution from employee to consultant to freelancer. It would be a much, much better book if it explicitly covered Macs, but this means the market is wide open for another book…
“In fact, it is hard to find computer books that don’t mention the Internet; even word processing, graphics and computer games books seem to insist on some sort of Internet relevancy. Which is not quite the same as being relevant.”
There are zillions of “Internet Directory” style books. What’s On The Internet, by Eric Gagnon, is highly useful, but somewhat misleading, since the focus isn’t so much the Internet but Usenet and ClariNet newsgroups. Issued on a periodic basis by Peachpit Press, these heavily illustrated volumes define what a newsgroup is, their conventions, quirks and limitations, and then give brief explanations of what particular newsgroups cover. The coverage is impressive: thousands of newsgroups are sorted into a giant alphabetical listing at the end of a volume, while chapters in the volume tackle more general topics, such as business, travel, politics, computers, and sports. The illustrations are all very appropriate, if somewhat peculiar: newsgroups are essentially collections of millions of messages, without any graphics, so the illustrations come from FTP or Web servers, which really aren’t covered. More than one person has purchased one of these volumes thinking it was a directory of pictures, but words – billions of them in 11,000 newsgroups – are the real topic.
Free Stuff From the Internet, by Patrick Vincent, doesn’t really cover newsgroups, but does cover everything else. If you can get past the neon green and yellow cover, you’ll see it is nicely divided into topical chapters (Arts and Culture, Health and Nutrition, Games, History, Business and Career, etc.). Within each chapter, a given subtopic usually merits a paragraph or two, and then lists specific FTP servers, Web servers, or E-mail addresses associated with that topic. Aside from the cover, you may also object to the slight Windows emphasis (the included CD-ROM has about a tenth as much Mac shareware as PC/Windows shareware), but the vast majority of the book is indifferent to particular computer operating systems. (And yes, the title is silly.)
A different approach is taken by Shannon R. Turlington in Walking the World Wide Web. Turlington’s book is a general guide to the Web, covering many of the same subjects as Vincent’s book. The difference: included with the book is a CDROM containing an electronic copy of the entire book. If you are connected to the Internet, and you have the CD-ROM mounted, you can both read the “book” and actually jump to whatever Web site is being discussed. You can read the book and see the movie, at the same time. The coverage isn’t as broad as Vincent’s book, but those with a CD-ROM might find it far more approachable.
Getting Started: Happiness is a Warm Modem
While the title is both offensive and alarming (do we really want people like this doing things like that?), The Internet for Macs for Dummies, by Charles Seiter, is a surprisingly good book. Entire sections have been “overcome by events” and are no longer relevant (GEnie, eWorld) or are still irrelevant (Prodigy, Delphi, CompuServe). Entire topics are also missing (Internet Service Providers, for example, merit just a couple pages, which say nothing useful). But it does cover the basics, in clear English, and with appropriate illustrations. The real treat, however, are the Richard Tennant “Fifth Wave” cartoons.
More technical, and for most people more useful, is The Macintosh Web Browser Kit, by Dan Meriwether. This book realistically expects the user to reach the Internet via a modem, and spends several chapters, and several appendices, on how to make PPP and SLIP connections from your Mac to the Internet. An extensive listing of recommended default modem strings for hundreds of modems, a review of the popular “Hayes” AT modem command language, and even an annotated CCL (Connection Command Language) script set this volume apart. If the preceding sentence made no sense, grab this book: Meriwether does an excellent job of taming modem mysteries.
Once you are connected, Meriwether concentrates on explaining what a Web client does, and what types of information you might find. Tu aid in your search, the included CD-ROM has a very large collection of compression, graphics and sound utilities, matched up with an excellent appendix on UNIX, Mac, Windows and DOS extensions, and how these relate to Mac file types. There is also brief, but decent, coverage of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) syntax, and instructions on writing simple Web pages. The emphasis of the book, however, is on getting you connected and doing something useful with what you find once you’re there.
Web Head: The Mac Guide to the World Wide Web, by Mary Jane Mara, at first glance appears too dated to be of use: it is a detailed examination of the Mac Web, Mosaic
“If you are connected to the Internet, and you have the CD-ROM mounted, you can both read the “book” and actually jump to whatever Web site is being discussed. You can read the book and see the movie, at the same time. The coverage isn’t as broad as Vincent’s book, but those with a CD-ROM might find it far more approachable.”
Pfaffenberger’s Netscape Navigator: Surfing the Web and Exploring the Internet, covers the title quite well, but only up to Netscape Navigator 1.1. Pfaffenberger not only explains what all the various, and at times mysterious, settings and menus do, but also offers advice on how to set them and why you should take the time and effort. This level of detail fills a critical void: very few Navigator users have bothered to purchase the official Navigator manual, or even to read the available on-line guides. The included CD-ROM is of limited value, containing a decent, if outdated, selection of freeware and shareware (but not a copy of Navigator). If you don’t have the resources to run the latest version of Navigator, by all means track this book down and buy it. Otherwise, you might want to wait for a new edition, promised any day now, which covers Navigator up to and including version 3.0.
Internet Publishing: Global Warming via the WWW
Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, in particular, have overwhelmed the Internet, in the public’s eye, and most people probably don’t know that there is much more to the Internet than the World Wide Web. The Web is where you can discover flash and dazzle, and it is the Web that inspires millions to try their hand at electronic publishing.
Before you start down this path, buy a copy of Elizabeth Castro’s Visual Quickstart Guide: HTML for the World Wide Web. This deceptively thin volume will tell you almost everything you’d ever want to know about HTML. Using nothing more complex than your word processor, or even Apple’s very simple SimpleText, and Castro’s guide, you can be constructing simple Web pages in minutes, and more complex ones in, oh, an hour. The entire richly illustrated book is of the “to do this, do this” variety: direct, to the point, with no skipped steps. You probably won’t need any other HTML documentation.
If typing HTML codes isn’t your style, and you want to try something more sophisticated, there is always Adobe’s PageMill. Tuuted as the “PageMaker of the World Wide Web,” PageMill allows you to create both simple and complex Web pages without ever directly typing any HTML code. It also doesn’t come with much in the way of documentation, but Maria Langer’s Visual Quickstart Guide: PageMill for Macintosh will probably answer any questions you might have. Done in the same direct, “to do this, do this” style as Castro’s book, every aspect of PageMill is explored in detail, and there are many details the average PageMill user may never discover without this book.
But the initial release of PageMill was plagued with some highly destructive bugs and perplexing oversights, and Langer’s book only covers PageMill 1.0. With any luck, this excellent book on a mediocre program will be followed with a new edition devoted to (let us hope) a vastly improved and more capable PageMill 2.0.
After tackling basic HTML, you might be tempted by Dave Taylor’s MacWorld Creating Cool Pages with HTML. The snazzy purple cover is probably more exciting than the book, which is mostly a rehash of “what is the Web” and “how do I find things.”
Mary Jo Fahey, on the other hand, spends almost no time on basic subjects: Web Publisher’s Design Guide for Macintosh is a heavy-hitting book aimed squarely at those wanting to go beyond simple pages and attempt true desktop publishing on the World Wide Web. For a variety of reasons, this isn’t quite possible (for one thing, there is no way to control the size of an HTML page), but Fahey, together with a wide range of featured graphic artists, makes a game try. Want to know how to turn a Quark XPress page into a Web page? How to turn an Adobe Illustrator file into a Web graphic? How to convert a Pantone RGB value into something you can use on a Web page? She covers them all, including such common but mysterious tasks as creating “transparent GIFs,” controlling text wrap around objects on a Web page, and using digital cameras to create images for Web sites.
Fahey’s book would be of value to almost any Web desire, but be warned: in addition to a wealth of public domain and shareware tools included on the accompanying CDROM, the book draws heavily on the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, DeBabelizer, Adobe Premiere, and other high-end programs. This is Serious Stuff, superbly presented. The book suffers from two flaws, one trivial (a horrible cover), and one aggravating (the index looks like it was generated by a program, and is not too useful). These flaws do not prevent it from being highly recommended.
For those with the means (or the job description), the next step involves setting up your own Web server. Bob Le Vitus and Jeff Evans tackle this in WebMaster Macintosh: How to Build Your Own World Wide Web Server Without Really Trying. Focusing on MacHTTP and WebStar (the most popular Mac-based Web servers), the book even includes a “personal” version of WebStar on the accompanying CD-ROM, together with a wide range of freeware and shareware tools for either extending WebStar or for creating HTML pages and accompanying graphics.
WebMaster Macintosh is cool, and hip, with a laid-back, conversational style. It is also infuriatingly incomplete, or outright wrong, and exhibits more evidence of padding (lengthy appendices of little value, transcripts of interviews of even less value) than careful writing, editing, and research. For example, say you wanted to create a clickable image map, a common enough Webmaster task, and you’ve learned there are two different flavors, CERN and NCSA. What are the differences? According to WebMaster Macintosh, ” … you can choose CERN or NCSA format when you save; there’s supposed to be a difference but we haven’t noticed any… From what we can tell, the difference as far as the imagemap format goes still won’t matter. (We choose NCSA because CERN is on the other side of the Atlantic and we like to buy American.)”
If either Le Vitus or Evans had spent even five minutes on research (translation: actually trying this out), they would have discovered the NCSA and CERN formats don’t even look alike. And if you try and run a WebStar server with an NCSA CGI (Common Gateway Interface), but supply it with a CERN imagemap (or vice-versa), the WebStar server will either freeze or crash.
Planning and Managing Web Sites on the Macintosh: The Complete Guide to WebStar and MacHTTP, by Jan Wiederspan and Chuck Shotton, lacks the breezy touch of the previous book, but it makes up for it with technical competence. Only the briefest attention is spent giving an overview of the Internet and the Web before plunging right into WebStar. Shotton wrote both WebStar and MacHTTP, so the coverage is as thorough, detailed and authoritative as possible, ranging from basic planning (how to give a logical structure to a Web site before adding lots of files) to exotica (running multiple Web servers on a single machine, running multiple domains on a single machine).
Once the introductory topics are out of the way, the book then goes on to discuss CGIs, how they work, recommended commercial and noncommercial CGIs, and how to write your own, in AppleScript, C, or something e lse (often Perl or HyperCard). One of the last topics is how to set up a RAIC (Redundant Array of lnexpensive Computers) to make a number of inexpensive Macintosh Web servers look and act (over the Internet) as if they were some giant all-powerful fault-tolerant super server.
Included with the book is a CD-ROM filled with either full, limited or demo versions of virtually every software package mentioned by the authors, including a demo version of WebStar itself. About the only real
★★★ Chris Casey, The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age. AP Professional, 1996. ISBN 0-12-162870-1. xxii, 266 pp., $19.95 http://www.apnet.com
Alfred Glossbrenner, The Little Online Book. Peachpit Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56609-130-6. xiv, 426 pp. $17.96
Alfred Glossbrenner and Emily Glossbrenner, The Little Web Book. Peachpit Press, 1996. ISBN 0-201-88367-8. viii, 244 pp. $14.95 800-283-9444 http://www.peachpit.com
Woody Leonhard, The Underground Guide to Telecommuting: Slightly Askew Advice on Leaving the Rat Race Behind. Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-201-48343-2. xxii, 346 pp. $24.95. http://www.aw.com 800-822-6339
Eric Gagnon, Whats On The Internet, Winter 1994-95. Peachpit Press, 1994. 260 pp. $19.95 (“includes coupon for PC/Mac disk” but there is a $5.00 shipping fee) 800-283-9444 http://www.peachpit.com
Eric Gagnon, Whats On the Internet, Summer-Fall 1995. Peachpit Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56609-184-5. 366 pp., $19.95. 800-283-9444 http://www.peachpit.com
Patrick Vincent, Free Stuff from the Internet, 2nd Ed. Coriolis Group Books, 1996. ISBN 1-883577-79-9. xxxiv, 590 pp., $24.99 (includes CDROM). http://www.coriolis.com
Shannon R. Turlington, Walking the World Wide Web: Your Personal Guide to the Best of the Web. Ventana Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56604-208-9. xxii, 322 pp. $29.95 (includes CDROM) http://www.vmedia.com/shannon/shannon.html
Charles Seiter, The Internet for Macs for Dummies. IDG Books, 1994. ISBN 1-56884-184-1. xxiv, 291 pp. $19.95
★★★ Dan Meriwether, The Macintosh Web Browser Kit. John Wiley & Sons, 1995. ISBN 0-471-11818-4. x, 322 pp. $29.95 (includes CD-ROM)
Mary Jane Mara, Web Head: The Mac Guide to the World Wide Web. Peachpit Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56609-176-1. xvi, 252 pp. $24.95
Bryan Pfaffenberger, Netscape Navigator: Surfing the Web and Exploring the Internet. AP Professional, 1995. ISBN 0-12-553130-3. xx, 314 pp., $29.95 (includes CD-ROM) http://www.apnet.com
★★★ Elizabeth Castro, Visual Quickstart Guide: HTML for the World Wide Web. Peachpit, 1996. ISBN 0-201-88448-8. xvi, 176 pp., $17.95 800-283-9444 http://www.peachpit.com
Maria Langer, Visual Quickstart Guide: PageMill for Macintosh. Peachpit Press, 1996. ISBN 0-201- 88661-8. xx, 148 pp. $15.95. 800-283-9444 http://www.peachpit.com
Dave Taylor, MacWorld Creating Cool Pages with HTML. IDG Books, 1995. ISBN 1-56884-705-X. xx, 280 pp. $19.95 (includes floppy disk) http://www.idgbooks.com 800-762-2974
★★★ Mary Jo Fahey, Web Publisher’s Design Guide for Macintosh. Coriolis Group Books, 1995. ISBN 1-883577-63-2. x, 406 pp. $34.99 (includes CD-ROM)
Bob Le Vitus, Jeff Evans, WebMaster Macintosh: How to Build Your Own World Wide Web Server Without Really Trying. AP Professional, 1995. ISBN 0-12-445574-3. xxii, 299 pp. $29.95 (includes CD-ROM) http://www.apnet.com
★★★ Jan Wiederspan, Chuck Shotton, Planning and Managing Web Sites on the Macintosh: The Complete Guide to WebSTAR and MacHTTP. Addison-Wesley, 1996. ISBN 0-201-47957-5. xvi, 368 pp. $39.95 (includes CD-ROM)