THE first person I made friends with online before meeting live was Judith Broadhurst, back in 1991, when we both hung out at the Journalism Forum on CompuServe.
She was experienced online even then, although her strength was not and is not hardware expertise. So her book about the Internet, The Woman鈥檚 Guide to Online Services (McGraw Hill, 拢17.95, ISBN 0 07 024168 6) limits the hardware advice to a short section.
The bulk of it is taken up with reviews of the main online services and women-only areas, plus guides to finding things such as material on health, education, travel and periodical databases. There鈥檚 even a guide to costs, managing money by modem, and lots of material drawn from interviews.
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The information is American-based, so some services covered aren鈥檛 available in Britain鈥攆or example, Prodigy, GEnie, and Women鈥檚 Wire.
It鈥檚 a very good book, but why do women need a separate guide to the Net? You might ask a similar question about The Ireland Guide to the Internet by Jim Aughney and Jimmy Plenderleith (Urban Dynamics, Dublin, 拢9.95 pbk, ISBN 0 952 68470 5). The authors recognised the problem鈥攎ost of the book is pretty standard fare about hating computers, getting connected, and how the Net works. It鈥檚 only the examples, based on the Irish national Net service provider Ireland Online, and the last three chapters, that are specific to Ireland.
Two of these three chapters are about employment and business opportunities. This is your chance to find out, for example, that Ireland is the hub for communications between the US and the rest of Western Europe, making it vulnerable in the event of another world war.
Switzerland figured out that the way to preserve neutrality was to store everybody鈥檚 money, and this may be the answer to Ireland鈥檚 worries. People have been writing for at least two years now that digital cash is the future. Digital Money by Daniel Lynch and Leslie Lundquist (Wiley, 拢17.99/$24.95 pbk, ISBN 0 471 14178 X) aspires to tell you everything you need to know.
After a condescending beginning, there is interesting background on agencies and companies involved in encryption and Net commerce and a survey of what the future may hold. Some services described鈥攏otably CheckFree鈥攁re not available in Britain. Conversely, an electronic money scheme based on smart cards, Mondex, isn鈥檛 mentioned even though it is being tested in Britain.
You get the feeling the authors may have run out of material, because once they鈥檝e covered the competing systems and talked about the legal validity of digital signatures, they segue irrelevantly into the Communications Decency Act and the legal status of online service providers.
Although there鈥檚 some good material here, it鈥檚 hard to see who needs this book. If you鈥檙e interested, you鈥檙e probably already up to date from reading about the Net.
Meanwhile, books on the Web just keep coming. Go Web! by David Harvey-George (Thomson Computer, 拢24.95 pbk, ISBN 1 85032 251 1) is a British book that covers the basics of Web publishing, reviews HTML authoring tools such as Internet Assistant, and looks at running a server, scripting and design, with a good section on marketing.
The hot new wave in Web books, though, is VRML, the new language which describes the movement of three-dimensional objects through space. If you want to try this, get yourself a VRML browser, go to a site and wait a long time for something to download and move around.
But if you really want to understand how this stuff works and how to incorporate it into Web pages, try a good survey: Internet World 60 Minute Guide to VRML by Sebastian Hassinger and Mike Erwin (IDG, 拢18.99/$19.99 pbk, ISBN 1 56884 710 6). For more of the same, but bigger, read Creating Cool 3D Web Worlds with VRML by Paul Summitt and Mary Summitt (IDG, 拢33.99/$34.99 pbk with CD-ROM, ISBN 1 56884 796 3). Despite the title, most of the book is not about rolling your own virtual worlds; instead, it concentrates on topics such as what the Web is and how to set up VRML browsers.
If, after all that, you decide you鈥檙e 1) lonely, 2) horny, or 3) prurient, try Sex and the Internet by Davey Winder (Future Publishing, 拢12.99 pbk, ISBN 1 85981 049 7), complete with pictures. Parents are advised that transmitting this book to minors may be an infringement of the Communications Decency Act.