The Mosaic Handbook for the X Window System

Oddly enough, O'Reilly and Associates, which publishes a new edition of "iWhatever - The Missing Manual" on every iWhatever product about every eight months is still printing and shipping this 12 year old computer book. It is an important one in terms of the history of the web, so I thought I would write a review on it. Just to be clear, my four stars refers to the value of the history in the book, not what current technical expertise you can hope to gain. This book is fun to look at in that you get O'Reilly's perspective on the Internet and where it was headed, detailed instructions on how to use the early popular browser Mosaic, and a look at the Global Network Navigator - a creation of O'Reilly's and one of the first attempts at building a kind of web Wiki. Particularly humorous is the book's attempt to explain what web surfing is - the term and the concept were both new in 1994. In this age before Java and applets, HTML with imbedded images was the closest thing you were going to get to multimedia, and the book talks extensively about HTML and building your own documents with imbedded images. In conjunction with creating HTML documents is a discussion of HoTMetaL, an early HTML authoring product. The book ends with a look forward at the web's possible future, and it is interesting to look at these early interviews when the idea of web as a haven for people of ill intent hadn't entered the picture or anyone's mind yet. In 1994, everybody's intentions were still assumed to be good and the web was going to be one great big source of information, accessible to all. I would recommend picking up a copy of this computing history classic and looking through it if you can find it. It is quite the history lesson.