 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Student's Guide to the Internet - Book Review Lesley Howells |
Aimed at university students, this useful book is also valuable to others, especially senior secondary students and adults returning to study.
David Clark takes us step by step through the process of getting connected, discussing the use of dedicated connections and setting up a terminal account, dial-up accounts, and choosing and setting up TCP/IP software. He shows as much of UNIX as you need to know for the Internet, if that is the system available to you. We are then taken through e-mail, USENET news groups, FTP, the World Wide Web, IRC, adding voice and video, MUDs and other games, and creating your own Web page using HTML (the best piece of advice on Web page authoring I have seen - from the Net site, The art and Zen of Websites - is, "You should try to hold your breath for as long as your page takes to load!")
The author addresses the reader directly throughout, using a humorous, often ironic, tone that helps readability while covering the use of the Internet for research, recreation, and business. He includes subject-based lists of resources and mailing lists, FAQs for students and beginners, and addresses for downloading utilities and programs you will need and URLs that are just for fun.
Having learned all that, we are taken through the research strategy that might be used for a hypothetical research essay on Constructivism in education: theory and practice. Practising our new skills we use e-mail and usenet groups to post messages asking for help on our topic, search the education database ERIC for suitable journal articles, and search gopherspace for more useful material. We then sift and evaluate the quantities of useful material gleaned, ready to write our paper. Clark also shows how to cite resources found on the Net.
Although it emphasises the use of UNIX throughout as being the most likely environment available on campus, the book shows at each stage how browsers and utilities for Macintosh and PCs (including Win 95 versions) work. Despite a fairly heavy American bias this is an excellent starting point for students wanting to get connected to the Net.
| David Clark: Student's Guide to the Internet 2nd
ed. Published by Que ISBN 0 7897 0881 7 334 pages RRP $29.95 |
About the reviewer:
Lesley Howells has been a Library Technician in a secondary college for more than 20 years and helps students
to use the Internet.
Reprinted from the March 1997 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
