BKDRVINF.RVW 940812 New Fields Publishing Box 14, R.R. 3 Brandon MB R7A 5Y3 (204) 729-8943 "Driving the Infohighway", Neufeld, 1994, 0-920436-54-4, C$24.95 Neufeld@BrandonU.CA Neufeld's book is an institution-specific (in this case, Brandon University) guide to the Internet. As such, it is not, strictly speaking, suitable as a general Internet guide. There are, however, some compelling reasons for those outside of Brandon to be interested in it. For one thing, it is excellent, and Neufeld is willing to take on projects for other institutions. For another, it demonstrates what can be done in a non-UNIX and non-workstation environment (VAX/VMS). Finally, even having to weed out the Internet stuff from the Brandon material, it does make for a very decent Internet guide. After an initial introduction to the Internet, three chapters deal with access topics specific to Brandon University, while the fifth gives new users some orientation to the VAX. Chapter six starts the Internet "how to" with email. One aspect of the book is the seamless integration of the site-specific information to the Internet content. Thus, this, the subsequent chapters on Usenet, archie, ftp, file transfer, file archiving, telnet, chat (using PHONE, talk and IRC), advanced email, mailing lists, finding email addresses, gopher, WAIS, and World Wide Web might be difficult for a non-Brandon user to disentangle, but must provide a terrific introduction for BU users. Chapter twenty closes with a look at the growth and future of the Internet. Appendices give a glossary and some (mostly gopher) resources, plus more details on VAX topics. While there are occasional problems (I noticed one file specification which actually points to a directory, in one important resource), the material is generally of superior quality and arrangement. I have reviewed a number of more costly and supposedly more generic books which give far less than this value and content. If you want a site-specific manual, get Neufeld to do it for you. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKDRVINF.RVW 940812 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag