Review

Crossing the (I)Ts?

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE INTERNET FOR HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
SS Chellen
Routledge, 2000

Human perversity dictates that we take more delight in finding that a crossword compiler has got a clue wrong than we do in actually completing their puzzle. Reviewing ‘how-to-do-it’ internet books is similar sport – not for the easy target of incorrect URLs subject to incessant revision, but for inaccuracies that reveal the limits, as opposed to the extent, of the author’s knowledge.

Viewed against such exacting standards I have to concede, albeit reluctantly, that this book passes the test –almost with flying colours.

The author, a senior lecturer at Christ Church College, Canterbury, introduces a wide range of educational uses of the internet, from getting online and searching for information to creating your own web pages.

So why my reluctance? Simply an irrational prejudice against this type of publication, basically a workbook, being produced by a mainstream publishing house. Its origins are clear in its unwelcome parochial advice (for example, ‘Get to a computer laboratory in your college and sit yourself in front of a Windows NT workstation’).

This, together with the ‘badging’ of the book as ‘for health professionals’ when it is transparently aimed at students results in a probably unwarranted high irritation factor.

The litmus test of this ‘photocopiable resource’ should be whether we would indeed copy any of it as handouts? The answer is an undoubted ‘yes’ – but these would not include the appendix informing us of the suffix codes for countries connected to the Internet in 1996.