I am one of today’s heretics: every day I sit alone in my car for a 25‐mile drive to work, often enough listening to a radio advert for British Telecom services to facilitate home and tele‐working and do away with commuting to the office. There is some irony also in that I drive that distance to spend increasing amounts of my time planning remote access and distance learning facilities for students to my library service over a wide geographic area. Physician heal thyself? There is now no question of the enormous and ever increasing influence of telecommunications on modern business and society, nor of their potential for further development into ever newer areas.
At some time all of us are affected by modern telecommunications: some more than others, particularly in my case since my Library took over a computing service with ever increasing responsibility for network services to students as a cornerstone of all our developments. I thus attend meetings with technical staff where terms and concepts are bandied about, some of which I might know only dimly, or some not at all. This book will, therefore, prove invaluable as it is aimed precisely at people like myself: “this book provides non‐technical professionals with the essential knowledge required to succeed in this dynamic, fast‐growing industry. This comprehensive volume offers readers a painless way to fill any knowledge gaps they might have, while providing new insights about the operational aspects of today’s increasingly complex networks. Of course, this book also makes an excellent reference for those outside of the industry who want to better understand how telecommunications technologies are advancing”.
The book succeeds in these aims very well: it is clearly written and uses jargon only where it is explained or cross‐referenced elsewhere in the book. That includes an invaluable, even essential, 16‐page glossary of acronyms in an appendix. There are more than 200 entries, many of which go into some detail. And by no means all of them concentrate on technical matters, but there are, for example, informative entries on distance learning (although this takes a rather too technical definition of a subject which is not necessarily always IT‐based), ISO 9000, call centres and the like. Business applications are also covered, for example business process re‐engineering; the entry on “downsizing” proves to be on computer configurations, although it does have a note explaining the more sinister side of the expression in terms of employee downsizing. But the real meat and strength of this volume lie in dealing with more technical matters in terms which we can all understand. Automatic number identification, cellular communication, infra‐red networking, network security, video‐conferencing: these are typical examples pulled out at random. I did not expect any entries under “library”, but curiously I note that there are none either under “information”, not even in the index. But the volume does cover the whole field of local and wide area networks as well as of voice and data communications. This is an encyclopaedia, not a dictionary (despite the LCSH assigned with the cataloguing in publication data), and so it gives very helpful articles of an appropriate length on particular topics, rather than a lot of shorter entries under different specific terms.
The book originates in the USA and much of the technology is dominated by the USA market and applications, so that it is no surprise that the text reflects that. There is only an occasional annoyance when articles emphasise the US scene, even though there is a flourishing one in Europe also which gets no mention: that was particularly obvious in the article on distance learning which, while itself accurate and useful, ignores European and other world developments and is based on provision through a US‐based educational system. In the circumstances, however, that is a fairly minor point. The Internet, intranets, the World Wide Web are all here in specific articles, as well as cross‐references to related articles. The work is also backed up by a fairly comprehensive index so that a lot of invaluable information becomes easily accessible. The accessibility is increased further by the generally clear and helpful writing style suited for its intended audience, and particularly by the physical layout and presentation of the book which are both clear and elegant.
That all adds up to an excellent and highly recommended book which is well suited to a business or professional audience, and is certainly not just for the techno enthusiasts. As such it is recommended stock for almost any reference library collection, although one copy at least is going to live up to its “desktop” title.
