Within a few years of its emergence, the Internet has become an essential part of life for most scientists and engineers. It owes a large part of its phenomenal success and growing popularity to the World Wide Web, the penultimate example of distributed computing, and the data ubiquity the Web has made possible. Thanks to the Web scholars and scientists have evolved new, cost-effective and time saving ways of publishing, disseminating and searching information. Major publishers and information providers have recognized the tremendous potential of the Web-witness Science Direct of Elsevier, Web of Science of the Institute for Scientific Information, and the many conferences on electronic publishing-and are experimenting with real time online delivery of information and new pricing models.

Hardly anyone-scientist, engineer or a lay person-ever learns about the Internet and the Web from a book. Most of us learn to point and click our way from site to site through hands on experience and with some help from our colleagues. The Net itself offers much help. But if one wants to acquire mastery over the Net and explore all possibilities on the Web, then one needs the help of an expert. This book by Brian Thomas is one of the best I have come across. The fact that four reputed societies other than SPIE, viz. ASME, IEE, IEEE and SAE, have lent their names as joint publishers is an indication of the importance they attach to the new developments and the quality of the book.

The book is divided into three parts, each dealing with one of three distinct yet closely overlapping areas, viz. essential tools and applications, web authoring and publishing, and searching and researching. Starting with a comprehensive introduction to web technologies and the essential tools for communication, the author moves on to browsers and tells the readers how to leverage one's browser to maximize one's advantage. Then he moves on to providing some in-depth perspectives on electronic publishing in science and engineering and explains the profound implications of `personal publishing'. This is followed by some down-to-earth instruction on constructing web pages and advanced web publishing. He introduces HTML and other essential technologies, explains the construction of tables, forms, and graphics, and provides guidance on standards and avoiding pitfalls. The author makes a casual mention of XML, which was emerging at the time of writing. Surely, he will write a lot more about it in subsequent editions.

In the final section, the most useful to a very large number of scientists and engineers, the author discusses, with the help of some actual examples, the merits of half a dozen search engines: AltaVista, HotBot, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos and Yahoo. He lists a very large number of selected web sites for 22 fields, running to more than 150 pages. The fields include agriculture, aeronautics, biology, chemistry, computer science, medicine, physics, and virtual reality. A glossary that has more than 200 entries, a bibliography of selected books and a whole section comparing different search engines add to the value of the book.

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