by Christopher Fulkerson

This might be a good book if it only worked.  If you weren't being tested on it you might not mind having it around, for one-fifth the price (at the most).  But even as a reference, since it's not all there in any version, it's an expensive waste, and the height of frustration.

The hard copy cannot give you the online functioning of course, but the online version doesn't function.  The publisher and the publisher's site and interactivity with the publisher's staff is all very bad, the worst you can get without being totally ignored.  The web site gives you one of those online experiences in which the site tells you one thing but calling the telephone numbers gives you something completely different. Using the ebook continuously without interruption, I nevertheless get timed out.  I was once gone for literally about three seconds and the site told me I had been gone for over an hour and logged me off for twenty minutes.  I am going to be hopping mad if this happens during an exam!   The ebook has no table of contents so you have to click every chapter in a row to get around.  The ebook has no page search function so you have to click every page one after another to go forward or back.  This can be a severe liability when you are taking a timed test.  Basically, it's d****d unfair, and the publisher truly doesn't act as if it cares.

The answers to the Practice Quizes are at a different site - they have out-sourced the answers!  And the "Answers" site does not give answers, it only tells you you're wrong.  No learning experience is to be found there.  The "Practice Tests" are not all complete: you can spend your time doing one, only to get to the bottom of the page and find there is no button to click for any answers.   Such pages are a "Practice" in frustration, with no answers at all, not even to tell you you're wrong.  And you'd better tell them not to track your answers or they will.  The videos within the chapters don't work.  Many links to other videos don't work.  In Chapter 6 alone, Figures 6-29, 6-44, 6-45, 6-48 and others don't work.  Also, just to use Chapter 6 as an example, the book recommends a video at BitTorrent but the video is not to be found there: apparently BitTorrent is not very impressed with Parsons and Oja, or maybe it is the Cengage publisher they know is a bust.

Their staff are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.  They are quick to try to sell you things though, and all paths lead to "buy now."  (You can't even sign in after buying without having to pass the "buy now" page. This is a world where "Marketing" means "Exploiting the 99% to the Max.")  When I wrote to tell them none of the links in chapters 1 and 2 worked, they asked me which links don't work, and quickly closed the case.  No action is definitive, not even when "escalated," and "escalated" cases are also given only 24 hours to be resolved.  It took four or more weeks for me to get enough information to be able to infer that I needed to get a different version of the book, and it was the Sales girl who helped me work that out, not anybody in Tech.  Case complaints are stopped 48 hours after they send you an answer, even when the "reply" you get is not really a reply; once I got a reply saying something like "When you say none of the links work, I don't know which ones you mean.  Can you give an example?"  Sheesh.

Success on the exams depends on catching classic style trick questions.  I am getting over 90% in the class so this is not the complaint of someone who gets tripped up too easily.  They just don't think pedagogically when it comes to formulating tests.  A test is certainly NOT a learning experience.  You are lucky if it's clear.  Every exam question has a "Submit" option hovering nearby, with no explanation as to whether clicking it means you are finishing the exam.  This is precisely the presumption that an educator in this topic should not assume is known.  Properly cautious students don't sip from just any beaker in the apothecary.   The "Submit all and finish" button is way too close for comfort to the "Next page" button.

I notice that many of the things I'm complaining about - especially a reluctance for answers to be in the place labeled "Answers," and tests to actually have answers - are consistent with recondite security classification strings and paper trails of old.  The text is not written that way, but it's every use by the e-publisher suggests that the publishers are not educators, these are people more used to hiding information than revealing it.

The bias to PCs and to certain companies is shameful.  There is Index entry for "Chrome," you are supposed to know it is "Google Chrome."  Actual wrong information is given about Apple products.  Sticking to Chapter 6 for examples, I can say that the authors direct you to the Finder to perform a Ping, but the path is obviously one in the hard drive (and it still isn't right).  For their extreme favoritism of PCs over Apple I do fault the authors.  Or is it the publishers who insisted on the bias?

As a book it has some value.  It seems the authors are writing in good faith (the shameful treatment of Apple not forgotten), but I imagine they have their own complaints with the publisher for the atrocious way the book is left dysfunctional and unsupported.  I'm sure they noticed that since the hard copy includes links that don't work online, no version of the book is satisfactory.  These authors are not preventing you from realizing the connection between bank clearing houses in 1830s London around the Babbage era and communication between routers in a recent Local Area Network.  Oh golly maybe human events and computers are related, nudge nudge.  Of course that is a level of inference far beyond 2013 public understanding but they do present some material in such a way that you can put some bits and pieces together yourself.  But if you are under the gun and really need to get their automated tests right, and if you feel the money you pay should mean that the functions they claim should actually work, this material is not up to speed.

Copyright 2013 by Christopher Fulkerson

First Posted here 10/11/2013. Updated 11/28/2013.

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