The Internet for Dummies, 7th Edition Starter Kit

By John R. Levine, Carol Baroudi and Margaret Levine Young.
March 1998, 405 pages plus CD-ROM, US$24.99. C$35.99, £23.99, ISBN 0-7645-0700-1.

The lucky seventh edition! After all these years, the Internet keeps changing, and so does The Internet for Dummies. Fully revised for 2000, with coverage of the Net's hot topics, including building your own home page, and on-line chat, and WebTV,! with a CD-ROM full of useful Internet software for Windows 95/98 and the Macintosh.

What's new?

• Fully updated for 2000, including coverage of Internet Explorer 5
• Covers on-line chatting and instant messages with ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger.
• Revised chapter on on-line shopping, tips and pitfalls, and the answer to the Credit Card Question. (Yes, we do, if you were wondering.)
• Separate chapters on AOL and WebTV.
• Updated resources for your kids.

Table of Contents

Part I: Welcome to the Internet
1. What is the net? What Is the Web?
2. The Internet at Home, and Work, at School, at Play
3. The Net, Your Kids, and You

Part II: Internet, Here I Come
4. Picking Your Internet Service
5. Connecting to the Internet

Part III: Web Mania
6. Welcome to the Wild, Wonderful, Wacky, World Wide Web
7. Wrangling with the Web
8. Needles and Haystacks: Finding Stuff on the Net
9. More Shopping, Less Dropping
10. My First Home Page

Part IV: Essential Internet
11. Mailing Hither, Mailing Thither
12. Putting Your Mail in Its Place
13. Mail, Mail the Gang's All Here
14. Instant Messages, for When a Minute Just Isn't Soon Enough
15. Let's Get Together and Chat
16. Swiping Files from the Net
17. AOL" Can Twenty Million Users Really Be Wrong?
18. Tuning In with WebTV

Part V: The Part of Tens
19. Ten Frequently Asked Questions
20. Ten Ways to Find E-mail Addresses
21. Ten Kinds of Files and What To Do with Them
22. Ten Ways to Avoid Looking Like a Klutz
Appendix: About the CD
Glossary
Index

CD-ROM Contents

Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/98 Programs:

• Adobe Acrobat Reader: A free program you can use to view and print Portable Document Format, or PDF, files.
• Eudora Light: An excellent, free electronic mail program you ca use to send and receive e-mail messages over the Internet.
• Free Agent: An excellent, free newsgroup reader (or newsreader) program you can use to participate in thousands of online discussions over the Internet.
• HotDog Professional: A shareware program that enables you to create your own World Wide Web pages without requiring you to be an HTML programming whiz.
• Internet Explorer: Microsoft's web browser
• Mindspring: Software that helps you sign up for an Internet account with Mindspring, a large national U.S. Internet Service Provider.
• mIRC: A shareware Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, program you can use to interact live, via your keyboard, with a group of people on the Internet.
• Netscape Communicator: The world's most popular web browser package
• Paint Shop Pro: A shareware graphics program you can use to view virtually any image you're likely to encounter on the Web. Using this program, you can create and edit images and convert them into different file formats, which is useful if you want to make your own Web pages.
• WinZip: An invaluable shareware decompression utility you can use to make compressed files usable again.
• WS_FTP Pro: A 30-day trial version of an excellent File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, program you can use to copy files between your PC and a computer on the Internet.

Macintosh programs:

• Adobe Acrobat Reader: A free program you can use to view and print Portable Document Format, or PDF, files.
• Anarchie: A shareware File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, program you can use to copy files between your Macintosh and a computer on the Internet.
• BBEdit Lite: A freeware text editor that enables you to create your own World Wide Web pages using HTML programming.
• Eudora Light: An excellent free, electronic-mail program you can use to send and receive e-mail messages over the Internet.
• GraphicConverter: A shareware graphics program you can use to view virtually any image you're likely to encounter on the Web. Using this program, you can transform images from one file format to another, which is useful if you want to make your own Web pages.
• Internet Explorer: The world's second most popular web browser
• InterNews: A shareware newsgroup reader program that lets you participate in thousands of online discussions.
• Mindspring: Software that helps you sign up for an Internet account with Mindspring, a large national U.S. Internet Service Provider.
• NCSA Telnet: A shareware program that lets you log on to other computers as a terminal via a slightly old-fashioned method called Telnet.
• Netscape Communicator: The world's most popular web browser
• StuffIt Expander and DropStuff: Invaluable decompression programs that open files that have been compressed in StuffIt archives. They can also decode files sent as BinHex, the Internet file encoding scheme for Macs.