Everybody's Guide to the Internet

If you have access to a personal computer and want to explore the Internet, Everybody's Guide is the place to begin. Foreword by Mitchell Kapor. If you have access to a personal computer and want to explore the Internet, Everybody's Guide is the place to begin.

Everybody's Guide is designed to make you comfortable in the virtual world of the Internet with its insider language and peculiar local culture. Accessible, friendly, and authoritative, it offers a clear, bare-bones introduction to the Internet, with just enough technical information to get you online. Additional help is offered at the end of each chapter in the form of a section on what to do "when things go wrong," and another section, called "FYI," tells you where to look for further information.

Everybody's Guide covers everything you need to know about the rich and complex Internet environment: e-mail (including advanced e-mail); the "global watering hole" called Usenet and its essential newsgroups; mailing lists and bitnet; bulletin board systems; downloading files via ftp; information utilities such as telnet, gopher, archie, veronica, WAIS, and the World-Wide Web; information services such as library catalogs, weather reports, and traveling advisories; news services; IRC and MUDs; and the network in the classroom. The Internet is growing and changing so quickly that to help keep users up to date, Everybody's Update to the Internet is posted monthly and is available for free online over the Internet. Everybody's Guide was originally "published" electronically as The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.

It is sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow that works to protect civil liberties in emerging technologies.