How to Use the Internet, 2001 Edition

Series of screenshots illustrate how to use Internet Explorer 5 to connect to the Internet, revisit favorite web pages, find a company on the web, send e-mails and files, and buy a product over the web. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

In How to Use the Internet, 2001 Edition, Rogers Cadenhead has come up with an excellent picture of what most people do with the Internet. Furthermore, he explains each task--reading e-mail, searching and surfing the Web, chatting, and the like--with clarity and simplicity that are not found in many other books. Like the other books in this series, this one explains its subject with full-color, nicely rendered illustrations that closely associate explanatory text with screen shots from the software under discussion. The heavily graphical style will appeal to people who prefer learning visually to attempting to correlate an author's prose with what they're seeing on a video screen.

Users of the Mac and Linux systems will wish for illustrations that matched their computers--all of the screen shots in this book come from Microsoft Windows--but this book is beautiful in its understanding of what's important to most Internet users. Cadenhead explains how to connect to an Internet service provider (ISP), and goes beyond the expected e-mail and Web coverage to introduce chat (with both ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger) and stock portfolio tracking (on ClearStation). Cadenhead probably goes too far by attempting to cover Web publishing--the subject doesn't fit this format well--but, nonetheless, explains how to become a productive user of all aspects of the Internet. --David Wall

Topics covered: Essential skills required of a journeyman Internet user, including those that relate to e-mail, the Web, Usenet newsgroups, ICQ, and AOL. There's coverage of MP3 music (although not Napster), as well as introductory material on how to publish your own pages.