Navigating the Internet: About the Authors

Navigating the Internet, Third Edition

About the Authors

Richard J. Smith discovered the information resources of the Internet while doing work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh. He taught the use of the Internet in graduate courses and followed this by giving workshops called "Navigating the Internet" in 1991.

In the summer of 1992, Smith decided to offer a course on Internet training over the Internet, hoping to get 30 or 40 persons to participate. A total of 864 people from over 20 countries registered for his "Navigating the Internet: An Interactive Workshop." A second workshop drew more than 15,000 participants.

The result of these ground-breaking, international workshops is that Smith has trained literally thousands of people around the world in how to use Internet resources. This led to Smith being dubbed an "Internet mentor" in the January 1993 issue of American Libraries. He plans to do bigger and better international Internet workshops in the future because he enjoys offering a service that is much needed and appreciated.

Smith can be contacted at

For more than a decade, Mark Gibbs has developed technical and service operations, consulted, lectured, and written articles and books about the network market.

Gibbs was cofounder of Novell's U.K. operation, where he was responsible for the management of all technical services. He was with Novell for five years, and since leaving he has pursued a successful career as an independent consultant and analyst.

Gibbs has written books on networking—Do-It-Yourself Networking With LANtastic and The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Networking, both from Sams Publishing, and Networking Personal Computers from Que Corporation—and contributed articles about PCs and networking technology to various journals and periodicals. He is a contributing editor to the Patricia Seybold Group and technology analyst to the National Computer Security Association.

Mark can be contacted on the Internet as

Paul McFedries has been online since 1987, but still, inexplicably, has a life. Besides toiling miserably in the corporate world for many years, McFedries has been a programmer and consultant specializing in data communications, as well as spreadsheet and database applications.

McFedries currently writes full-time and is the author or coauthor of over 20 books, including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Usenet Newsgroups and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Internet E-Mail by Que Corporation. When he's not writing, McFedries enjoys surfing the Net (of course), desktop video production, programming for the sake of programming, and shooting pool.

McFedries can be harangued or complimented (he prefers the latter) at

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