Welcome to the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh HTML Edition. This HTML version contains all the text, all the graphics, everything from the third edition of the print version, in a fully interactive format.

Before you begin reading Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, you need to know how to move around the book, and what to do when you encounter something interesting.

• Navigating the Chapters: This book is broken down into five parts, twenty-nine chapters, and four appendices. If your Web browser tried to load everything at once, it wouldn't get more than two chapters in before it ran out of memory. So, we've broken this book into lots of separate sections that you move between using the navigation buttons. Each chapter has two sets of these buttons -- one at the top and one at the bottom -- that you can click on to move around the book. These buttons are:
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    This button takes you forward one full chapter. At the end of each part, it takes you from the last chapter in one part to the introduction of the next.

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    This button does the opposite -- it takes you back one chapter at a time, and, if you're reading the introduction to a part, it takes you to the last chapter in the previous part.

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    To fit some of the larger chapters into your Web browser, we've had to divide them into several sections. This button moves you forward through these larger chapters one section at a time.

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    Just as above, this button takes you backwards through the larger chapters, one section at a time.

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    If you haven't encountered a word before, you can use this button to jump directly to the glossary.

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    To let you move around in the book quickly, we've provided a hyperlinked table of contents, to which this button takes you.

  Each chapter also has a hyperlinked table of contents. You can jump to any subheading in a chapter by clicking on it in that chapter's table of contents, just as you would in the overall table of contents.

• Investigating the Rest of the World

  There are links to Web pages, newsgroups, FTP archives, Gopher sites, and all manner of other Internet phenomena throughout this book. You can click on any blue, underlined link, and your Web browser will do its best to take you there. For instance, if you click here, your Web browser will attempt to connect to Netscape Communication Corporation's Web site. From there, you can download a copy of their Netscape Navigator software. We recommend that you do so -- the HTML version of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh makes use of certain features of the Netscape browser that improve its appearance considerably.

  If you click on a link and your browser tells you that the site may be down or busy, and you know that your connection is functioning, don't worry. The Internet is getting somewhat congested as time goes on, and popular sites sometimes become too busy to handle everyone. If a site that you're interested in seems busy, try investigating it later -- traffic is at its heaviest during the daytime hours, and you'll probably have better luck and faster access at night (or during nighttime where the machine you're trying to connect to is -- remember, the Internet spans the world. What's daytime to you is the middle of the night to someone on the other side of the globe.)