OFFICIAL AMERICA ONLINE INTERNET GUIDE

While America Online (AOL) has built its success on making online life simple, its sphere of influence only goes so far. The Internet remains the Internet--a vast expanse of cyberspace far more varied than most newcomers imagine. This guide prepares Windows users who are ready to venture beyond the AOL community. Peal and Savetz are careful to differentiate between AOL and the Internet proper but show how the two are connected. They also demonstrate the various tools included with AOL that enable members to access a wide variety of Net resources.

The authors explain Net functionality and resources by comparing them to AOL, which is easy for AOL veterans to comprehend. However, Peal and Savetz go even further to provide a well-rounded Net education by discussing topics from packet-switching technology to accessing files by File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to HTML encoding for Web pages. The Official America Online Internet Guide also takes an expanded look at the world of e-mail and includes detailed information on mailing lists and how to use them. Information on newsgroups goes beyond using AOL's reader to explain how the groups are set up, classified, and managed. The book offers introductory reviews to many of the resources AOL makes especially accessible--such as the "AOL 300," a selection of 15 top Web sites and newsgroups related to each of AOL's 20 topic areas.