So far, we've looked at the Internet in the abstract only, and it's important that you have an overview of the world you are entering. Like all things electronic, however, the Internet is terribly picky about the details; you must know exactly what to type and where to click. Moreover, unlike on your friendly local Macintosh, on the Internet real people see what you type, so I also talk about the social customs of the Internet, the manners and mores that everyone eventually learns. And, because I hope the Internet becomes something about which you talk with friends, I try to pass on some of the jargon and modes of speech.
Chapter 6 covers the basics of "Addressing & URLs" so you can figure out how email addresses and machine names are formed. In it, I also talk about Uniform Resources Locators, or URLs, which are used on the Internet to provide a coherent method of identifying Internet resources such as Web pages and files available via FTP. Chapter 7, "Email Basics," focuses on email usage and mailing lists, and Chapter 8, "Usenet News Basics," is devoted exclusively to Usenet news. Chapter 9 describes "TCP/IP Internet Services," those being services that require a full Internet connection, such as Telnet, FTP, WAIS, Gopher, and the World Wide Web (although I do pass on a few tricks for using Usenet, FTP, Archie, and even the Web through email in Chapter 7). Finally, Chapter 10, "File Formats," discusses the many file formats you find on the Internet.
Keep in mind that this information is all background -- I don't tell you the specific details of how to deal with programs on the Internet or anything like that, until Part III and IV. Nevertheless, I feel that this is important background, so unless you've spent a fair amount of time on the Internet already, I recommend that you read through these chapters.
As a convention, I write all network addresses, whether they are machine names, full email addresses, or URLs, in this monospaced font. Note also that any punctuation following the address is not part of the address itself; instead, it's required by my seventh grade English teacher, who was adamant about ending clauses with commas and sentences with periods. Every now and then, I leave off a period when it confuses an address that ends a sentence, but the thought of her beet-red face (I'm sure she was very nice, but she reminded me of a lobster) looming over always makes me add that period. So remember that addresses never have any punctuation at the end.
Commands that you type exactly as written look like this; when there is a variable that you have to fill in, it looks like this. So, TYPE this means to type the word TYPE, followed by whatever is appropriate for this: your name, a file name, a directory name, a machine name, or whatever.
Finally, any text that shows up as though it scrolled by on a terminal window appears in its own monospaced font, line-by-line, much like the following lines.
To: The Reader
Subject: Style conventions
From: Adam C. Engst
I hope these conventions don't seem too onerous - it can be hard in a book to show precisely what the user sees, as opposed to what was or should be typed.
cheers ... -Adam
Chapter 6, "Addressing and URLs"
Chapter 7, "Email Basics"
Chapter 8, "Usenet News Basics"
Chapter 9, "TCP/IP Internet Services"
Chapter 10, "File Formats"