Book Review

This book is a victim of its subject. It offers to be a guide to "construction industry related information" that can be found on the Internet. But the Internet changes so rapidly that any book on its content is going to be out-of-date before it can get to the bookshops.

The Construction Net can be considered in two sections. Section one consists of three chapters: first an introduction; second an outline of the nature of the Internet; and third, some detailed descriptions of the on-line ‘tools’ available for interacting with the Internet - email, usenet, ftp, etc. The second of these chapters is interesting, but achieved little more than a reinforcement of the reader’s bewilderment at the system’s escalating complexity. The third, which should be of practical use, is thorough in its coverage, but written in a rather unengaging way that fails to excite the reader about the possibilities of exploiting the growing resources of this global ‘brain’. (I suspect that most people learn about the powers of email, for example, more by using them than by reading about them).

The second section, occupying some three-quarters of the book, consists of an inventory of Internet sites arranged broadly in categories borrowed from the RIBA ‘List of Recommended Books’. The suggestion is that this list will help readers decide which sites to visit for specific information, but in practice it is little more than a surfing companion. There is little guidance on the relative value of the various sites, which you must assess for yourself once you have accessed them. A useful glossary is provided at the end of the book, but there is no index.

If you do use the Internet site list as a companion to surfing you quickly find another way in which the book is a victim of its subject (discounting, that is, the large percentage of site addresses which are already out-of-date, which doesn’t matter too much since online links are often given to the new addresses). When you do happen on a useful site, such as that kept by the Architecture Studies Librarian at the University of Nevada, you find an array of enticing links, any of which needs no more than a mouse-click... At this point you discard the book and begin to explore the Internet in ways that are more appropriate to its nature.