Internet

Jude Biersdorfer has been writing the weekly Q&A column for the Circuits section of The New York Times since 1998, and she occasionally writes feature stories and how-to articles for the same section. She has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review and the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, among other publications, and has contributed essays on the collision of pop culture and technology for the books The Education of the E-Designer (2001) and Sex Appeal (2000), both published by Allworth Press. In her limited spare time, she likes to watch documentaries and torture the neighbors with her clawhammer banjo playing. She lives in New York City. David Pogue, Yale '85, is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. With nearly 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world's bestselling how-to authors, having written or co-written seven books in the "for Dummies" series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music), along with several computer-humor books and a technothriller, "Hard Drive" (a New York Times "notable book of the year"). Pogue is also the creator and primary author of the Missing Manual series of complete, funny computer books, a joint venture with O'Reilly Media, Inc. Titles in the series include Mac OS X, Windows XP, iPod, Microsoft Office, iPhoto, Dreamweaver, iMovie 2, and many others. His Web page is www.davidpogue.com, and his email address is david@pogueman.com.

"Guides to the internet are becoming as common as website pages in a search result list, but with O'Reilly behind this particular title, IWR decided to take a closer look. O'Reilly is at the forefront of technology publishing and has a knack of explaining things clearly. Could this book live up to its title? The consumer focus gives the book a bright and breezy style, both in its writing and its design. Lots of box-out texts have been incorporated to provide clear definitions of technology, all of which help add to the usability of the title. Even the index is theme-based rather than following a set pattern. Although this isn't a book for the information professional to read and inwardly digest, it does come up with some great metaphors to help explain how the internet and the technology behind works and accompanies them with some excellent definitions. Those facets alone make The Missing Manual a useful resource title for teaching information usage." - Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review, January2007