Book Reviews En Banc by A.M.Rutkowski The Internet Navigator by Paul Gilster, John Wiley & Sons, 470 pages, soft cover. The Internet Navigator is one of the half dozen or so books that now provide an introduction to the Internet for the uninitiated - tilted a bit toward the individual dial-up user. This is a marketplace that is now exploding around the USA. Gilster does a good job of packaging together nearly all the basics from who to call to get connected to how to begin navigating the Internet. It is perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough of the books now out there in dealing with the Internet. However, there is a certain danger in this - for the shelf life in the rapidly changing Internet world is very short, and some significant parts of the book are already out of date. In addition, Gilster seems to ignore the entire subject of software, and the book pretty much presumes that you will be hung off a Unix host as a dumb terminal. On balance, this is a really good book for 24 bucks that should keep the Internet market scaling. The Mac Internet Tour Guide (with disk) by Michael Fraase, Ventana Press, 288 pages, soft cover. I think this book is probably the nicest and most attractively done of all the recent books on how to get started on the Internet - albeit tailored for Mac users. What is particularly valuable are the chapters that take you through obtaining and configuring the software on your Mac to begin engaging in some first class Internet cruising. The diskette included with the book even facilitates this by providing Fetch, Eudora and Stuffit Expander - the three key applications needed to easily retrieve files and use a POP3 mail server. All the nice diagrams and screen snapshots really make this book interesting, informative and fun to use. The only downside is that it's description of the Internet Society is rather inadequate. However, if you own a Mac and want to begin cruising the Internet, this is the book to get. New Books from O'Reilly & Associates O'Reilly specializes in low cost, very current books for the Internet and Unix communities that are both informative and useful - a kind of Internet version of a handbook. The publishing company has also been highly innovative on the network - it's Gopher server at remains the model for publishers. !%@::, A Directory of Electronic Mail by Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams, 443 pages, soft-cover. This third edition of the book remains the bible of electronic messaging today. One could easily borrow the American Express slogan with the quip "don't do messaging without it." The book introduces you to electronic mail in all its many forms and flavours, tells you about the networks throughout the world - Internet, commercial, X.400, Bitnet, Fidonet, etc. - with an up to date summary of information on each, plus handy references such as all the world's subdomains. The wife-husband team authors are among the most knowledgeable people in the Internet world. This is one of those publications for which you just enter a lifetime subscription. Connecting to the Internet by Susan Estrada, (Buyer's Guide) 170 pages, soft cover. Susan founded and formerly ran CERFNet and is one of the people who helped significantly grow the provisioning side of the Internet. Her book is a much needed "how to do it" for anyone interested in getting Internet connectivity and using it as part of their organization or enterprise. The sections are simple and straight-forward: how the Internet works, network performance, how does someone use the Internet, how to choose providers and service options. If you want to know how to connect your organization, get this book. Geek of the Week, Internet Talk Radio, Carl Malamud, producer, audio casette. One of the more clever new Internet based services to arise over the past six months is Carl Malamud's Internet Talk Radio. Carl multicasts these programs on the Internet once a week - picking an Internet personality affectionately beknighted as a "geek." Occasionally he branches out to tap just interesting people - like the Dali Lama. Because not everyone has the connectivity, time schedule or the configuration to listen to Carl's show on the network, O'Reilly has innovatively created a new market by packaging audio cassettes in little plastic book-like packages bearing the ORAudio label. The initial very popular and informative offerings include European Networking, Internet Security, Information Services. Highly recommended for those long drives to work. Learning the UNIX Operating System by Grace Todino, John Strang, and Jerry Peek, 92 pages, soft cover. This 3rd edition is revised and expanded, and part of nutshell handbook series intended to get the complete computer novice up and running on a Unix or X- Windows systems in a one-hour sitting. Rather than being an introduction to Unix, it's a "how to use Unix" book. It's also filled with many of the little details and tricks the regular Unix Weenie knows by rote and does so regularly that they forget to tell anyone to tell newcomers. This is the kind of book you set in front of the keyboard in every University terminal room. If you are just beginning to use the Internet and need to understand how to start using Unix on a remote host - buy this book. (It's actually a rather handy reference even if you've been long using the network.) Learning Perl by Randal Schwartz, 246 pages, soft cover. This book is intended as "a gentle introduction to Perl" - the Practical Extraction and Report Language of the Unix world.Perl is a powerful set of tools to manipulate text. If you're going to spend much time on a Unix operating system, chances are you will want to learn how to use Perl. If you ever have a need for manipulating massive amounts of text, you will also probably want to learn Perl. (When my friend Carl Malamud was challenged by the ITU bureaucracy to turn the 20,000 pages of CCITT standards on tapes of bungled encoded character sets into a useable on-line anonymous ftp service on a machine called Bruno, he used Perl scripts to single-handedly get the job done in six weeks - a task the ITU had estimated at 30 man-years.) Sendmail by Bryan Costales and others, 792 pages, soft cover. This book must have set the size record for O'Reilly. It is industrial strength coverage for the workhorse agent of the Internet messaging world known as Sendmail. This is the province of system administrators, an invaluable handbook, and a nice companion to companion books TCP/IP Network Administration, DNS and Bind, and MH & XMH. The publisher appropriately enough chose a bat to adorn the book cover - for this spooky subject that requires an introductory section entitled "why is sendmail so complex." This book is not for your ordinary Internet end user - but it's a godsend for the people who have to make internetwork messaging systems work - done by the guys who helped write the code. High Performance Computing by Kevin Dowd, 371 pages, softcover. As O'Reilly notes in it's promotional material, this book is a departure from their usual handbook orientation. This book focuses on the world high performance computer architectures - a subject pretty much restricted to the arcane world of the Cray until the evolution of technology has morphed high-end workstations into Crays during the past two years. The author makes a credible case for the necessity for those writing code for the emerging world of the supermicro to have a pretty solid understanding of how to deal with these new machines described as "finicky." Clearly this book is important - but for a fairly specialized audience. New Books from Prentice-Hall / SRI International Internet: Getting Started by April Marine et al., Prentice Hall, 360 pages, soft cover. This book was done by some of the very knowledgeable staff that helped run the former Internet Network Information Center at SRI International and answered a lot of basic questions over the years. It is intended as "everyone's first guide to Internet connectivity." The first half covers Internet access, while the second focuses on Internet applications and services once you get connected. Internet: Mailing Lists, edited by Edward Hardie and Vivian Neou, Prentice Hall, 356 pages, soft cover. This book is intended as a companion to the Getting Started book by the same publisher - focussing particularly on Internet mailing lists. It provides the basic reference information on how different mailing list servers operate as well as an extensive alphabetical listing and subject index for over 800 lists. This book is a unique reference that makes it a valuable asset for any significant Internet user - especially if you intend to use the Internet for collaborative work with others who share your professional, institutional, or social interests. Although the information may get out of date rather quickly, it is a good first place to check "what's out there." New Books from Artech House A Guide to the TCP/IP Protocol Suite by Floyd Wilder, 313 pages, hard cover. Artech's books are typically directed at a technical audience, and this guide is no exception. It focuses specifically on the TCP/IP protocol suite and does a very comprehensive and credible job in providing an introduction to these protocols. Going further than just walking through the standards, Wilder provides network context and shows how the different protocols fit together and provide internetworking functions and services. I'd recommend this book as the best single reference or tutorial book on the subject. Unix Internetworking by Uday Pabrai, 197 pages, hard cover. In some ways, this book is a companion to the TCP/IP guide that is also part of this series. It provides good, comprehensive overviews of the Unix operating system in its various flavors, how networking and client-server applications are integrated into the system, and then focuses on specific applications and problem areas like NFS, NIS, DNS, X-windows, and security. One of its more valuable and unique features is the last section of the book on internetworking and integration with other popular network operating systems including DEC, Novell, Appletalk, and managing these integrated environments using SNMP. This is a very good handbook and tutorial on real-world networking today for anyone involved at network engineering or administrative levels. Secure Data Networking by Michael Purser, 241 pages, hard cover. In a world of vast open metanetworks, the subject of network security is being catapulted into the networking consciousness almost as much as safe sex in a world of AIDS. This book on secure data networking provides a broad introduction to the subject that spans both the TCP/IP and OSI worlds. It covers various methods of attack as well as the security management methods for combatting those attacks. The only down sides of the book are its tendency to get too involved in the underlying mathmatics of cryptography and security in some places, as well as its strong skew in the ISO-OSI direction when the real-world marketplace is presently strongly skewing toward TCP/IP implementations. Online No book review in the Internetworking world today would be complete without mentioning the incredible new service that has become available to Mosaic users of the World Wide Web (www) courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NCSA has recently ported the Mosaic client to Mac and now PC Windows platforms to provide ubiquitous access to what was formerly available only for Unix workstations. Mosaic is without a doubt the most elegant, attractive, and intuitive distributed knowledge browser ever put together. It seamlessly integrates virtually every platform and application into one graphic-oriented hypertext interface. What's New With NCSA Mosaic and the Internet Resources Meta- Index by the NCSA Software Development Group staff, on-line. These never ending "books" are updated daily and providing hypertext links to Web servers around the world. They are amusingly provided with the quip "you may wish the following to keep track of the evolution of cyberspace and to find information on the Internet." The What's New publication is organized by knowledge browsing service (WWW, WAIS, Gopher, plus an aided Telnet), then by index categories (searchable, subject, server, and miscellaneous), then by resources and disciplines. Also included is an Experimental Graphical MetaMap that shows browser relationships and linkages. For a spectacular journey into what the Internet is and where it is headed connect to this book!