Book details of 'New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages'

Title	New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages
Author(s)	Christine Maxwell, Czeslaw Jan Grycz, New Riders Publishing
ISBN	1562054082
Language	English
Published	October 1994
Publisher	New Riders

---

Back to shelf World Wide Web
Amazon.com info for New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages

Score:

Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Will the real "Yellow Pages" please stand up? Is it this one? Hahn and Stout's original "Internet Yellow Pages" ? NIS (Network Information Services, the "yp" programs)? I suppose it doesn't matter: we'll see all manner of "yellow pages" over time. This outfit, the McKinley Group, is certainly serious about the task. All entries have a standard format with title, rating (zero to four STARs--yes, they made an acronym of it), brief description, keywords, audience, and user information, ending with a URL (Universal Resource Locator) listing. Once you get used to it, this is a very quick overview containing almost everything you need. For old hands at the Internet, this is a very handy resource. For newcomers, it might be a bit terse. There are seven "chapters" of introductory material. These total a lot less than thirty pages, and are very hard to follow, as they are interspersed with directory entries. The differences between mailing list programs are downplayed and the explanation of URLs fails at several points. (By the way, don't expect any consistency in the use of forward and back slashes in URLs here.) (In fact, don't expect all the URLs to *be* URLs.) The listings have a very heavy emphasis on mailing lists and newsgroups. ftp sites are far less common in the directory than on the net. There are a great many listings for commercial services whose only Internet connection is that you can use telnet if you have an account. (If those systems are time sensitive, telnet might not be what you want to use for access.) There are paid advertisements, in the same format as other listings. You can't have everything in an Internet directory: the net is too big and changes too fast. Having done a few dozen searches, I found that the total number of listings, and the index access, to be less useful than the Hahn/Stout work. Offsetting this, to a certain extent, is the fact that the "keywords" in each entry act as a second level of indexing. Following a keyword search is something like reading a Thompson Chain Reference Bible, but it does guide your search in directions you might not otherwise have chosen. (Ahem. Most computer viruses are *not* obtained from downloaded files. Yes, you *can* have a virus attached to a Windows document. VIRUS-L is also comp.virus. And why does the "Computer Viruses" keyword have CAD sites in it?) The standard format and keyword linking are good features and promise well for future editions. The introduction, listings, index and proofing need work. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995
Add my review for New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages