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This book describes formats commonly found on the Internet. It should often help people who want to look at or use a file but don't know what kind of file it is. It will help people who want to provide files on the Internet in formats that many people can read. It will also help programmers or system designers who want to write programs to handle files, but I'm not sure if there is enough information for this purpose. Internet File Formats by Tim Kientzle Book Review by Lance Sloan This book describes formats commonly found on the Internet. It should often help people who want to look at or use a file but don't know what kind of file it is. It will help people who want to provide files on the Internet in formats that many people can read. It will also help programmers or system designers who want to write programs to handle files, but I'm not sure if there is enough information for this purpose. When the book describes a file format, typically it says what the format is used for, how to recognize if a file has that format, where to get more detailed information (both electronic and books), and where to look for tools that can work with the format. For instance, if you wonder about a file named "WhitePaper.pdf," the index (page 388) tells you where to get information about ".pdf" files. Chapter 2 has many ideas on how to look up information, also. For most of these formats, the book itself has quite a bit of information. An included CD-ROM has quite a few tools for working with files in many of the formats. I mounted the CD-ROM on my Macintosh to verify that it was readable, but have not tried any of the tools. The CD-ROM should work with Macs, PC's, or UNIX systems. The book contains six major sections. Four sections are on file formats for documents, graphics, sound, and movies, respectively. Another section is on "encoding" files to avoid damage by the network. The last section is on "archiving" and compression. Each of the six sections begins with a summary chapter that introduces concepts. That is followed by several chapters, each on an important format. Section 1 does not simply describe formats for documents, but also has quite a few good-quality tips on how to prepare good-quality documents. The author discusses some methods to make documents readable by many people and readable decades into the future. The books listed in the bibliography appear to provide more details about file formats and often appear to be definitive references. For instance, it recommends the "HTML Sourcebook" as an HTML reference. I bought that book a year ago when it was recommended in a quality Internet publication. I have been pleased. This increases my confidence in the quality of the bibliography. However, I doubt that many are tutorials for beginners. This book is recommended for those who need some information about a variety of file formats. It is also recommended for people who need or want to look at many types of files and don't have many tools to handle them. Because many file types originated in the UNIX world, it will probably be especially valuable to Macintosh or PC users who are unfamiliar with such files. It is probably less valuable for UNIX users, who deal with such files regularly. Still, a co-worker who uses UNIX has found the book useful and plans to read more of it. "Internet File Formats," ISBN 1-883577-56-X, is copyrighted by Coriolis Group Books, distributed by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., and has a list price of US $39.99. Published at the November 1996 edition of TMUG Insider. For an electronic copy of the newsletter with more articles and goodies visit our web site at http://users.aimnet.com/~napann/tmug/tmug_home.html

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