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Under The Microscope

INTERNET -- A NEW ZEALAND USER'S GUIDE by David Merritt and Paul Reynolds; Penguin, 1995; 172pp; $29.95

Reviewed by Phil Anderson

I'm afraid this is a bit of a curate's egg of a book -- good in parts. If you want a quick introduction to what would be involved in getting on the net, then you might well want to borrow it from a library, but I'm not convinced you'd want a copy of your own.

Internet's problem is that although there's certainly useful information present, the book tries to mention far too many things in too little space. For example, I don't see much point in devoting a page to Unix shell commands. Anyone using Unix will want more information than the book provides; anyone else probably doesn't need to know very much at all.

On the good side, I strongly approve of the authors' emphasis on good nettiquette (rules of courtesy while on the net).

The second half of Internet is a varied selection of mailing lists, newsgroups, ftp sites, Web pages and so forth. There's bound to be something of interest to everyone there, but again it's broad and shallow.

Phil Anderson is the assistant editor of New Zealand Science Monthly