How to Use this Book

If you're reading this on our Web pages, you probably already have a good idea of how to use the book and how to use a URL to pull up a Web page. Nevertheless, this section of the book's introduction has some good information about the book itself in addition to specific instructions for using it, so we've included it anyway.
How to Use This Book
We learned a lot from this book's predecessors. And answering six to ten email messages every day is a great way to learn of problems people experience when they begin to use a book like this.
One of the first areas we've improved upon in this book is the consistency of the addresses. When Rick began work on the original book over two ago, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and hadn't really taken off yet. As a result, there weren't a great many Web pages in the book compared with many more FTP sites, Gophers, and sites to finger for information of all sorts. Now of course, this has changed dramatically.
Today, the World Wide Web is very much the graphical user interface (or GUI) for the entire Internet. From the comfort of your Web browser, you can access the best of everything the Internet has to offer. In fact, the few types of resources that you can't access directly from your Web browser, you can access with a couple of other types of programs--an email program and a telnet client.
There are, by far, more addresses for Web pages in this book than any other type of Internet resource. In fact, about 88% of the resources are Web pages. The remaining resources are (in descending order of prevalence):

Usenet newsgroups
Mailing lists
Anonymous FTP sites or files
Gophers
Telnet resources
Email addresses
Of course, with your reasonably up to date Web browser, you can view Web pages, Usenet newsgroups, FTP sites, and Gophers. All of the addresses in the book, with the exception of email addresses and mailing lists, are in the standard Universal Resource Locator (or URL) format. We did this to provide an additional level of consistency throughout. What this means to you is that you can type into your Web browser the text of the address exactly as you see it in the entry. If there's a file that you want on an FTP server, you don't need to know how to use an FTP program, or anything else about it. For example, if an entry in the book shows the address for file like this:
URL:
   ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1320.txt
all you have to do is type the text ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1320.txt into your Web browser's Location or Open Location edit box. Your browser will fetch the file and display it in its window.
In some cases, we list FTP sites and reference a directory instead of an actual file. You don't have to do anything different for these. For example, you might see:
URL:
   ftp://cert.org/pub/papers/
When you type this URL into your browser's Location box, you'll see a list of the files and subdirectories within that directory. Here's how it will look:
[Figure 1]
We include URLs for directories since everything in a particular directory might be of interest. For example, if the FTP site houses a collection of picture files, you might want to see or look at more than just one of them. By giving you the URL for the directory, you can see each file and subdirectory in that directory and choose to look at any you like.
Similarly, if a resource you're interested in happens to be an item on a Gopher server, you can just type the URL into your Web browser. For example, if the address listed is:
URL:
   gopher://cell-relay.indiana.edu/11/docs/rfc
simply type that URL into your browser's Location box, and here's what you'll see:
[Figure 2]
The types of resources you can't immediately access directly through your Web browser are telnet resources, and email--which includes both a regular email address to mail a message to someone, and mailing lists. However, with a little ingenuity, you can even use these resources seamlessly.
The developers of some of the newest Web browsers are including full-featured email functionality in their products. Most notably--Netscape. Some Netscape users swear by the power and ease of use of Netscape's built-in email system. But on the other hand, it's as easy to get both commercial and shareware email packages as it is to get hold of a Web browser.
Telnet clients are also easy to find (just check the resources in the Software section). And once you get one, simply integrate it with your Web browser by going into its Preferences dialog and specifying the path and filename of your telnet client.

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