MANAGING INTERNET INFORMATION SERVICES
                         Reviewed by Robert Szarka

        The arrival of a new book from O'Reilly & Associates is always an
occasion for joy. O'Reilly is a consistently good source of reference books
and tutorials on the Internet and the UNIX operating system: books that are
not only informative and well-written, but constructed with lay-flat binding
and adorned with drawings of our friends in the animal kingdom, (this volume
features the Bobac, which is, appropriately, a species of burrowing
squirrel).
        MANAGING INTERNET INFORMATION SERVICES arrives not a moment too
soon, given the recent explosion of Internet usage in general and the
phenomenal increase in usage due to information services like the World Wide
Web in particular. Small companies, organizations, and even individuals want
to provide information on the 'net, and many of them will find this a useful
guide. About half the text is devoted to Gopher and the WWW (the most
powerful and complex services), while the balance covers services based on
finger, telnet, mail, FTP, and WAIS. Short discussions of security and
intellectual property issues are also included.
        The book tries, and mostly succeeds, to serve two audiences: the
person responsible for installing and configuring the software and the
person responsible for maintaining the information resources themselves (the
"data librarian"). The chapters intended for the data librarian are marked
with a special graphic and are generally less technical, though they still
presume a basic familiarity with UNIX. Readers looking for a general
introduction to using these services, however, will need to go elsewhere.
(O'Reilly's THE WHOLE INTERNET USER'S GUIDE & CATALOG is a good place to
start.)
        Speaking of UNIX, this is the book's principal shortcoming: although
much of the text is useful for information providers using any platform, the
majority will be useless to those implementing Internet information services
under OS/2, Windows NT, Windows, or, for the brave or foolhardy, MS-DOS. Of
course, UNIX is still the lingua franca of the Internet, and a discussion of
other platforms is probably best left to another book. If history is any
guide, though, someone other than O'Reilly will have to publish it.
        So, if you're thinking of providing information over the 'net in a
UNIX environment, there's probably no better place to start than this book.
If you're working under another OS, you may want to give it a look anyway:
MANAGING INTERNET INFORMATION SERVICES is still a lot of book for $29.95,
and the Bobacs will look good on your bookshelf.

Cricket Liu, Jerry Peek, Russ Jones, Bryan Buus, & Adrian Nye
1st Edition
ISBN 1-56592-062-7
630 pages
$29.95
  
                        O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
                             103A Morris Street
                            Sebastopol, CA 95472
                     +1 800 998 9938 / +1 707 829 0515
                   +1 707 829 0104 (FAX) / order@ora.com

  Send your postal name, address, city, state, zip to 26prod@supportu.com
         for product literature to be sent to you via postal mail.