Keywords
Citation
Andrew, A.M. (1999), "Mastering Global Information Systems", Kybernetes, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 106-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1999.28.1.106.2
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This is a remarkably comprehensive and useful guide to the great variety of ways that computers can communicate. It is offered as a textbook for a school A‐level course, or for adult education, or for first year undergraduates, but it will be a handy reference book for readers at a wide range of levels. Apart from anything else, this is an area where obscure abbreviations keep cropping up, and a great many of them are included in a list appended here, and/or appear in the subject index. One example, the abbreviation FDDI, appears on the front cover of the book, and it was not till I referred to Chapter ten that I was able to expand this as “Fibre distributed data interchange”, a modern and efficient way of implementing a network.
The notes on the back cover claim that the material in the book comes under the five headings of Digital information sources and multimedia, the Internet and World Wide Web and Java, Local area networking, Wide area networking, and Video conferencing. In the contents list, the 15 chapters are not explicitly grouped under these headings but they fit them pretty well, at three to a heading.
Each chapter is followed by a set of tutorial questions. Correct answers are not provided, but this is no great disadvantage and could be seen as an advantage since the answers can always be deduced by careful reading of the preceding text.
The topics are dealt with in a businesslike way and often surprisingly thoroughly. The Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is explained in a fair amount of detail, with examples, and there is a small program illustrating the use of Java.
Inevitably, though, many readers will want more detail than can be given in such a small book and it seems a pity that there are no references nor suggestions for further reading. On the other hand, the author gives the address of a website at which topics of the book are expanded, and he also very kindly offers two e‐mail addresses that can be used to consult him personally. It is a very useful little book.