Yet another example of becoming outdated.
I've often said that the fact that the book that I wrote is highly outdated is actually a status symbol. After all, how many people can claim that they've published a book on learning to use the internet that was written for an operating system (Windows 3.11) that hasn't been in use for over five years? It dates me. But in this particular case, being dated is somewhat of an honor.
The book isn't only outdated today. By the time it was published, Windows 95 was already overtaking Windows 3.11 in popular usage. It might even be accurate to say that the book was outdated before it was published. I soon learned that in order to teach my courses I had to find a more dynamic method of preparing materials for my students. The system I hit upon was a two-pronged approach: First, instead of preparing a book with numbered pages, pages that would have to be renumbered as I changed what was written to more accurately reflect what was to be taught, I prepared separate explanatory files for each skill I taught. It was possible to change these more or less on the fly. Second, the exercises that I prepared weren't printed, but were instead stored on a disk which I distributed at the beginning of each course. These disks were then updated throughout the course if and when I changed the exercises because addresses of pages might have changed, or whole sites might have disappeared.
The system worked very well, but in a way I'm lucky that these courses have finally dried up. A major revision of both the explanatory files and the disk of exercises that accompanies them is most definitely called for, and I don't really have the time to attend to a task such as that.
Go to: You mean you teach this stuff?