Branwyn provides a clearly written guide for beginners accessing and navigating the World Wide Web using NCSA’s Mosaic browser. He assumes a rudimentary knowledge of the Internet, and writes in a light, casual style full of jargon, metaphors, and anecdotes. The book concentrates on illustrating the full potential of NCSA’s browser (version 2 alpha for the Macintosh). It is divided into five chapters.

Chapter 1, “The Net and the Web,” provides a quick look at the Internet’s growth, the history of hypermedia, and the emergence of the World Wide Web from its origins as a hypertext system for European particle physicists. It briefly describes the development of NSCA’s World Wide Web browser, Mosaic, and the reasons for its immense popularity. Branwyn attributes Mosaic’s success to its intuitive point-and-click design and its ability to provide a standard interface to the Internet.

Chapter 2, “Getting Started,” provides instructions on how to get Mosaic up and running on your Mac. It explains what hardware, software, and network connections are needed. It covers where to find Mosaic software on the Internet, how to download it, and how to configure the browser.

Chapter 3, “Cruising Mosaic’s Menus,” takes you on a complete and detailed tour of all Mosaic features, which starts with the menu and moves to navigating with URLs, hyperlinks, inline images, and hypermedia. It describes installing helper applications for viewing images, playing audio files, and watching QuickTime movie clips. Branwyn describes how to customize Mosaic and then provides a quick lesson on navigating using URLs. This and chapter 4 make up the majority of the book.

In chapter 4, “Web Walking with Mosaic,” the author describes how to use Mosaic to keep yourself up to date with the ever-growing and mutating cyberspace. He discusses how Mosaic can be used as a front end for accessing other Internet services, such as browsing Gopher menus, downloading files archived on ftp sites, using Telnet to log on to a remote computer, and reading Usenet postings. A brief outline on how to design your own HTML documents is followed by etiquette tips and advice on linking your page to others on the Net. To keep on the crest of the wave, a list of FAQs, newsgroups, and HTML editors is provided.

The last chapter, “Site Seeing,” provides a directory of Web resources, from reference to esoteric exploration. Unfortunately, this chapter is the weakest in the book. The author includes only a handful of general resources about the Internet, and even less on indexes, search engines, and robots used to search the Web. A full 26 pages of what the author claims are “cool sites to visit” make up the bulk of this chapter.

Finally, the book provides a glossary and bibliography, both of which are short, simple, and intended only as starting points for the beginner.

This is a clear and highly illustrated how-to book for getting started on the World Wide Web using Mosaic. Its shortcomings are the brief description of authoring Web pages in HTML, and an insufficient list of references, indexes, and search engines on the Internet. Though the book describes Mosaic’s full potential extremely well, it ignores other popular graphical browsers such as Cello, Netscape, and MacWeb, as well as text browsers such as Lynx.