Almanac & Yearbook of Facts 2000, Local Ireland, £9.95 or free on the Web
Reference books are changing to suit the Web age. The Irish Almanac and Yearbook of Facts, now under the wing of Local Ireland, is published simultaneously in print and on the Web at www.localalmanac.ie.
It contains a huge range of facts, statistics and nuggets of information about Ireland. However at time of reviewing at least two facts, accurate at time of publishing, have ceased to be true. Both book and Web list Paul Drury as editor of the Evening Herald. No longer so, and Anna Livia Radio no longer broadcasts on 103.8. But the beauty of an electronic almanac is that I can email updates to the editor.
A useful addition to the bookshelf of student or quizmaster.
- David Taylor
Programming Internet Email, David Wood, O'Reilly, 364pp, £28
We take email pretty much for granted. But what's the meaning of all those strange lines at the start of a message and how do we get messages from the other side of the world in the first place? This book looks under the email bonnet.
Wood emphasises the mundane but crucial struggle to impose email standards and thus ensure the health of the Internet's "killer application". His theme is that the future of email depends on sophisticated proprietary software - such as Microsoft's and Netscape's - adhering to the open standards approved by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).
The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard for attaching non-text information to an email message and the POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) retrieval standards are clearly explained - in some technical detail.
The book's chapter on spam has plenty of good advice for all email users and Wood's tracing of a real spam message back through a few innocent but careless ISPs is most enlightening.
Although it's primarily a reference book for programmers working with email, Wood's clarity of thought and language broaden its appeal.
- Tom Moriarty