The aim however, is not to give a comprehensive picture, but rather to get you to a point where you can make efficient use of the opportunities offered by this new telecommunication medium and hopefully give you enough curiousity to find out a bit more about it yourself. I have omitted to cover the history of it's development and the usual anecdotes about it's seminal figures, and how it all started etc, although these are very funny and interesting to some people. That not to say I will consciously steer clear of anything - I might slip a few things in now and again just to be contrary. If you are interested in the history of the Internet 2 and how it has developed you can find this in most books, and of course, on the Internet itself. The first chapter gives you some background information about what the Internet is and how it can be used for communication and as a information management, retrieval and publishing tool.
Further chapters take a more detailed look at particular applications and techniques.
These are to be read keeping in mind that there are 'suggested further learning opportunities' at the end of each section. Because this will also be available on the World Wide Web it includes links to other web sites. Links within paragraphs are underlined and have corresponding 'real' links grouped together at the side or bottom of the page. I recommend however that you that you ignore the links on a first read through the each chapter, perhaps coming back to them later. But without giving the impression that I don't actually know the difficult bits.