Book details of 'The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface'

Title	The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface
Author(s)	Paul Gilster
ISBN	0471113360
Language	English
Published	December 1994
Publisher	John Wiley & Sons

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the standard for the construction and use of documents which link to other items on the net through the use of URLs (Universal Resource Locators). The World Wide Web is the term which refers to the interconnected set of documents which use HTTP. (World Wide Web is often abbreviated to WWW, W3, or just Web, although this latter causes confusion with a social issues information network by the same name.) Mosaic is an HTTP or W3 client program, often referred to as a "browser". In addition, the Mosaic browser has a graphical interface, and can utilize "viewer" software to display graphics, sound, and video in conjunction with HTTP "pages". There are other browsers, some, like WWW and lynx, text-based. Other graphical clients include Netscape, now being built by one of the original Mosaic developers, and a proprietary part of the new "Warp" version of OS/2. Mosaic, itself, exists in multiple freeware, shareware, and commercial versions, and can be obtained for MS-Windows, the Macintosh, and X. For those who have access to the Internet, but do not yet have Mosaic or the necessary SLIP or PPP access, this book is an excellent guide to getting set up. Chapters three and four give quite detailed instructions for obtaining, installing, and configuring the program. This includes an explanation of the MOSAIC.INI file for Windows. Other resources include Mosaic and W3-related newsgroups and mailing lists. Chapter six is also a solid guide to the use of Mosaic to access ftp, telnet, Gopher, and Usenet news resources. Gilster's "The Internet Navigator" (see reviews) and "Finding It On the Internet" (see reviews) are both excellent works, and the weaknesses of this one are shortcomings only in light of that comparison. The explanations of the World Wide Web, HTTP, and Mosaic, while good, are not up to the previous standard. The directions are not quite as lucid, and sometimes seem to assume more knowledge on the part of the reader. Coverage of the actual operation of Mosaic could be stronger: figures would have benefitted from the use of pointers to items being selected, and the discussion of Mosaic menu items is better in the O'Reilly & Associates' Mosaic handbooks (see reviews). Also, while Gilster does discuss the fact that the capabilities of HTTP, W3, and Mosaic may be misused for trivialities, that point is not made strongly enough. He mentions the frustration involved with trying to use Mosaic with a slow modem, but not the growing impact of massive graphic, video, and sound file transfers on the bandwidth of the net as a whole. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994
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