Of these, O'Reilly and Associates publish the majority. My favorite introduction to the Net and its resources is Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalogue, Second Edition" (1994, $24.95, ISBN 1-56592-06305). Ed is the author of the classic Internet RFC 1118, better known as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet", the proto-handbook for Internet "newbies". (You can get a copy of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" and other excellent beginner's guides on ftp.eff.org at 192.77.172.4 in the /pub/Net_info/Guidebooks directory. The filename is hitchhikers.guide.gz, but just do an ASCII get on it as hitchhikers.guide and the ftp server will decompress it before sending it to you.)

If you're looking for stronger meat, O'Reilly and Associates offers "TCP/IP Network Administration" by Craig Hunt (1992, $29.95, ISBN 0-937175-82-X) is a useful overview of the TCP/IP protocol stack for non-programmers. It addresses the basics of configuring the Unix kernel for IP over Ethernet or serial lines, Domain Name Service (DNS), the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) and sendmail, as well as offering excellent appendices on everything from the gate daemon to how to register your domain name and obtain a network number from the InterNIC.

When you're ready to tackle setting up an Internet host system, get O'Reilly and Associates' "DNS and BIND" by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu (1992, $29.95, ISBN 1-56592-010-4). It goes into considerable detail on both topics. If you're going to set up a BSD Unix system, I urge you to also buy and closely study O'Reilly and Associates' "sendmail" by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman and Neil Rickert (1993, $32.95, ISBN 1-56592-056-2). The sendmail protocol is the backbone of Internet email and it is a configuration nightmare of arcane commands and syntax in interlocking scripts. It is also infamously riddled with security holes (Robert Morris' well-known Internet Worm worked by exploiting one of the holes in sendmail) and closing them all is a Herculean task.

Before you put your host on the Internet, you'll want to read Addison-Wesley's "Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker" by William R. Cheswich and Steven M. Bellovin (1994, $26.50, ISBN 0-201-63357-4). Cheswich and Bellovin based this book on their own experiences as network security officers for AT&T's Bell Labs. It's filled with war stories and the security principles they elucidate, and, although it won't teach you precisely how to defend your host against attack, it will at least open your eyes to the Unix operating system's security holes. Once you put your host on the Net, you may want to offer ftp, Gopher or World-Wide-Web servers. In that case, you'll again want to turn to O'Reilly and Associates for Cricket Liu, Jerry Peek, Russ Jones, Bryan Buus and Adrian Nye's "Managing Internet Information Services" (1994, $29.95, ISBN 1-56592-051-1). This is an implementation manual for all the above services, as well as mailing lists, WAIS servers and Veronica and Jughead registration and servers. It also has extensive appendices on Web servers, the HTML language and so on.