Online! The Book

honestpuck writes "Titling a volume 'Online! The Book' and putting "The perfect gift for any computer user!" amongst other hyperbole on the back cover must rank as this years greatest act of hubris." Honestpuck has a strong opinion of whether this hubris is justified or insane -- read on below for his review.

Online! The Book
author	John C. Dvorak and Chris Pirillo (with Wendy Taylor)
pages	701
publisher	Prentice Hall PTR
rating	3
reviewer	Tony Williams
ISBN	0131423630
summary	Padding, information and errors all in the one volume. Could be worse, but not by much.

If only John C. Dvorak and Chris Pirillo (with Wendy Taylor) had been able to deliver. If only they had not strewn the book with error, verbiage and irrelavancy. Ah, well.

This volume in its 700 pages (divided into 28 chapters) tries to cover everything from hardware basics to voice over IP, in between touching on e-commerce, security, web programming, networking, content management and business websites, to name just six of the topics perhaps each better suited to a volume of their own.

This book skims, and skims fast, over a number of important and vital topics while dwelling on others that many will find useless. Chris Pirillo seems to be an expert on marketing, so that gets thirty pages, while web programming languages get ten. We get forty pages of 'Hardware Basics,' which cover information vital to getting online such as operating systems, varieties of Intel chips, video cards and gaming audio drivers. I know that if I wanted to find the perfect spot to put breakout boxes about Babbage and von Neumann (essential to any book about getting online) I'd put them in the chapter on viruses. It seems as if the three authors said "we're contracted to seven hundred pages so let's just throw in topics we know a lot about until we get to seven hundred pages -- then stop."

Then there are the errors. We get editing errors like the text that tells us a 'geostationary satellite' orbits at 'about 22,300 miles,' next to a diagram showing the number 20,300 miles. We get errors in logic like the breakout box that has "DNS servers may run Apache, which is an open source Web server program" and goes on to imply that all DNS servers will run a web server. We get errors in grammar. We get paragraphs like "Although there are dynamic Web page URLs (meaning they change, or at least part of it does), most are static (stay the same). These can be dynamic by use of a programming error or dynamic because someone named the URL extension without adding a link elsewhere on the web site." With sentence construction like that I'm still not sure if the claim intended is true or not.

Did I like anything about this book? Sure, the chapter on 'How A Modem (Really) Works' was full of good solid information. Other chapters were similar, particularly the two following on networking and handhelds, phones and PDAs. Others did contain some good information, just surrounded by dross.

You can go to the book's website, which is basically just a single page with yet more hyperbole ("Everything is here. Well-written. Comprehensive.") or visit the Prentice Hall page, which actually gives you a table of contents and a sample chapter. Just don't go straight to the Prentice Hall PTR home page and search for books with "Online" in the title, as that won't find it. Instead search for books with "Book" in the title.

I'd only recommend this book to those who want to spend a lot of time finding the good bits, a few minutes chuckling over some of the errors, and thirty dollars on a paperweight. If you're really looking for a 'perfect gift' for people new new to the net, then find something cheaper covering just the essentials, and for those more expert, find a volume that actually covers a topic of interest well.

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You can purchase Online! The Book from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

duh

...and putting "The perfect gift for any computer user!"

Gee, and it's just out in time for Christmas. What a coincidence. No wonder they didn't have time to get their facts straight, December was coming.

Re:duh

"The perfect gift for any computer user!" points obviously to "A new computer".

This should be a "Perfect gift for people who read computer books".

What were you expecting?

It's Dvorak we're talking about here. The guy's too busy writing his Trolltech columns to actually learn anything new. I mean, thanks for explaining how a modem (really) works, guys. The 90's called -- they want their chapter back.

If wishes were fishes ...

If only John C. Dvorak and Chris Pirillo (with Wendy Taylor) had been able to deliver. If only they had not strewn the book with error, verbiage and irrelavancy.

If only I had run a spell-checker before posting ... (it's irrelevancy).

I think I'll wait....

I think I'll wait for the movie adaptation of the book.

Say what you want about Dvorak...

but I really love his keyboards.

Table of Contents

If every chapter has information about the internet and technology, I guess the table of contents sould be titled "Slashdot" :)

God....

When I first saw it, I thought it was some attempt to be a hard copy of the internet.

*remembers Dilbert boss joke.*

Heh heh...

Mel Brooks, eat your heart out...

Merchandising, merchandising! Online! The Book, Online! The Movie, Online! The Breakfast Cereal... Online! The Flamethrower! (The kids love that one.)

Look! The rating is a 3!

A 3? I think the Slashdot Universe is going to implode! Run for your lives!!!

Re:Look! The rating is a 3!

Look closer, it's really the 8 that they've just used so much some of the pixels are starting to fall off.

Why only computer books?

Junk, all in one books like this have always been quite common. It seems that computers have been around long enough that even the completely uninitiated know that computing is reasonably complicated. Do they try to sell "the only book you'll ever need" style books for business? Construction? Medicine? Maybe they don't feel there are quite enough fearful dupes to be had in those topics.

Hardly Suprising

It doesn't surprise me at all that this is light on any real technical details. John C. Dvorak, although obviously a pretty astute individual, has been part of PC Magazine or some other end-user (i.e. barely technical) related publication for quite some time. Although I have found some of his positions on technical and business ethics of interest, his technically oriented editorial contributions have typically been geared for the person who is just getting into understanding a PC, certainly not people in the /. community.

Great!!

Now I don't have to keep paying those damn ISP fees every month. I can just buy the book. What? You mean they haven't just printed out the internet? Crap!

Perfect gift idea for the newbies!

Forget the book then, I'll be giving out AOL 9.0 CDs! It's faster, more secure, and has an assload of ads!

What a way to introduce someone to the World Wide Wow!

this book is too long...

I'll just wait for Online for Dummies.

The sequels are even better

Coming soon from PTR:

Offline! Tales of slashdotting

Spelling! Secrets of the Slashdot editors

Speaking of hubris; try THIS on for size:

"news for nerds, stuff that matters"

Time warp?

1999 called, they want their book back.

What does it cost?

What does it cost? What I really mean is, can we get the book, online? :P

Destined to be...

On sale for $2.99 by mid March 2004

Re:Destined to be...

On sale for $2.99 by mid March 2004

$2.99? I got Bill Gates's "The Road Ahead" in a 50-cents bin. Are you telling me "Online!" is worth nearly six times as much as BillG's 1995-era visions of the future?

Well, OK, maybe.

This is the same Dvorak...

... who's been predicting the imminent death of Apple for 20+ years.

And now he claims "...no more junk email"

OK. That's quite simply not possible, and he must know it.

"Packed with secrets never before revealed"

You're telling me there's a lot (wnough to "pack" a book this size) important useful things about the internet that only these three people knew until now?

Hogwash.

correct me if I'm wrong

But I thought geostationary satellites are at an elevation of about 22,239 miles. It is important to get this right, otherwise your geostationary satellite isn't stationary.

Both figures in the book are wrong.

Quote makes it sound authentic.

...."If only they had not strewn the book with error, verbiage and irrelavancy."....

Hmm... sounds exactly like being online.

Ed Kroll

Where is Ed Kroll when you need him?

Metacomment

So, I guess this will shut up the morons who complain that every Slashdot review is positive...

(since this is a comment about comments, but on-topic because it's about reviews, does this count as a "metacomment"? My guess is I'm just an ass...)

ebook?

what? no e-book format?

sadly....

...i dont trust anyone who uses so many bevels, saturated colours and drop shadows on their site, so i wont be buying this book

Dead tree internet directories

I always thought those "white pages" and "yellow pages" Internet directory books were funny. With the ever-so-changing web, you would end up with a book containing a bunch of URLs to nonexistant pages within a few months. Why bother with such a book when a search engine would do?

Oh yeah, marketing. Of course, you could just make annual editions of internet "yellow pages" with corrected links, etc.

It's like going to the mailbox outside the post office to mail a letter.

P Is For Pirillo, P Is For Pathetic.

According to his webblog [pirillo.com], in the last few months, this poor bugger got his ass fired from TechTV, only to be replaced by the uber-knowledgeable (*snicker*) Leo Laporte; gotten sick; gotten food poisoning; has a conspiracy theory that Doc Searls is actually Colonel Sanders; has a beef with hydrogenated oils in soda crackers; has sunk to the oh-so pathetic level of doodling on his own body [lockergnome.com] in order to get hits to his website, "C:\PIRILLO.EXE -- Getting Screwed While Everybody Else is Getting Laid".

And to top it all off, he writes a newsletter called "Windows Fanatics". I feel so bad for this guy. World Vision should add this guy to their client list, he's at least as pathetic as the starving AIDS-ridden African child with flies crawling on his face.

BSD isn't dying, this guy is.

Perhaps their logic runs deeper than the Obvious.

Maybe they are trying to mimic the rise and fall 1999-2000. You know when people still thought they would make their fortune on the internet.

If there's one thing I know about computers and the internet, it's that fluff is a very big part of it's culture. Also, Pr0n is a very big part of the internet and computers, fluffing is even more pronounced by this.

I feel that by your review you have exposed the book to be far more accurate in delivery then it ever could dream to be in content.

why not 'online for dummies'?

This book is as perfect for every computer user as the 'Internet Yellow Pages' are. HMM, lets make a BOOK out of PAPER that lists all the websites we can find. Brilliant. These books are for people who always say,

'One of these days, you are going to have to teach me how to use computers'.

No, I won't.
Teach yourself or find something else to do. Writing a book like this is obviously going to make the authors and publishers some money, which is the point. This book was written by 'internet experts', the kind of people who get fired as soon as their companies find out how useless they really are. Then they get hired to write about what they barely know.

What does it take to get a 1?

I mean really, there should be a competition to find a book which sets new lows.

What's the point of having a scale of 1 to 10 if nobody has a 1?

If Dvorak put out a book with so little value that it's not worth reading, will mislead anyone who doesn't know any better, would corrupt young minds if given to a library, would shame you to admit to have read it, much less purchased it, invokes sadness to look upon -- knowing that trees died to print it, leads you to question the sanity of the publisher or the motives of the author, then by all means, give it a 1!

Look on the bright side...

...if you purchase a first edition book with spelling mistakes (particularly if you can get the authors to sign it), it will be worth more in proportion to the evidently etherous value of it's contents.

Orbit

editing errors like the text that tells us a 'geostationary satellite' orbits at 'about 22,300 miles,' next to a diagram showing the number 20,300 miles.

"Geostationary orbit" seems like a misnomer itself. If it's geostationary, is it really orbiting around anything besides the sun?

Oh the irony of it all

Seems sort of ironic that they would have a website online for a book about computer and internet basics. It should have a message like those bumper stickers, "If you can read this you don't need this book".

700 pages?

I don't have time to read all that. When will the Cliff's Notes version be out?

Full as a baked potato

120 comments and nobody has written a compare/contrast piece between Online! The Book! and Cannibal! The Musical! yet?

This can't be slashdot.

And in other news...

... Imminent releases from the same author include "Stuff" and "Things," and he is currently working on "Whatyamacallit."

``How a modem works'' chapter recycled

(probably) from Dvork's classic guide to PC Telecommunications, a mainstay back in the days of BBSs.

Sad.

William

Breakout box?

This is a breakout box. [prosoundcards.com]

While this is an example of a page with a sidebar. [boingboing.net]

This is only worth commenting on because I had no idea what the hell you meant.

Contractual obligation?

This book sounds like the equivalent of some music artist putting out an album full of filler just to fulfill a contractual obligation. Is that what's going on here -- Dvorak has a contract with Prentice-Hall that says he has to write n books in x years?

John Dvorak

Why is anyone surprised that a book by this asshat would suck?

ugh.

He's the retarded Andy Rooney of computer journalism.

Ahhh! My eyes! My eyes!!!

I clicked through to the book's website. ACK! I think I'm pernanently blind! I haven't seen something that ugly since my 5 year old niece made a web page about her puppies.

Nah, the puppy page was better.

*shivers* Oh my Lord, that was scary.

Hubris

On the hubr-o-meter, this does not quite measure up to O'Reilly publishing a book The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog.

Admittedly, they published it in 1992...

The ed. isn't one to be critical of sentence logic

[i]We get errors in logic like the breakout box that has "DNS servers [b]may[/b] run Apache, which is an open source Web server program" and goes on to imply that all DNS servers will run a web server.[/i] Since when does [i]may[/i] mean [i]must[/i]?

chapter 288..

Goatse.cx ...as the man bent over, he grabbed the sides of his anus and....

you get the idea.

Filthy Liars

"This may be the single most important book ever written fro people who go online and for people who want to go online." (From the book's website [onlinethebook.com] Lies. All lies.

Re:Why post?

Oh come on. The /. editors get enough slack for always posting rah-rah reviews. Now you wanna give them slack for posting a negative review? Pfft. Variety is good. It is nice to get opinions on what is great, and what might look good, but actually sucks.

Re:Considering...

Please mod down. Parent has no idea what he's talking about.
Yes, I am writing on a Dvorak Keyboard:
The keyboard was designed from work started in about 1930, by Dr. August Dvorak, an American from Seattle (distantly related both to composer Antonin Dvorak and the John Dvorak in question).

Re:Considering...

Err... no. The columust is John C. Dvorak. The Dvorak Keyboard inventor is Dr. August Dvorak.

Re:Considering...

You're probably just kidding, but it should be noted that John Dvorak had nothing to do with the keyboard of the same name. Look at this article [wikipedia.org] for starters.

Re:Considering...

Dvorak the PC Magazine columnist and the Dvorak keyboard layout are, perhaps surprisingly, unrelated. The keyboard is older than the columnist. [mwbrooks.com] It just never caught on until the era of computers, with their easily-remappable keys. (Arguably, it still hasn't really caught on; but anyway...)

Re:Considering...

unsuspecting world

Don't you mean "New World"? ;-)

Re:Considering...

You're obviously confused. Just to clear up any confusion, the book's author is not the inventor of the Dvorak keyboard, but is instead the famous Czech composer who brought us "The Moravian Duets" and "Slavonic Dances". Common mistake.

Re:more reviews of this book

They're all the same reviews over and over again. All the more reason to think less of this book.

Re:from the don't-hold-back-now dept.

Come on, Pirillo. Timothy just posted the review, Honestpuck wrote it.