Nowadays, paper does no longer suffice. Furthermore, in my own experience, the existence of online material does not prevent me from buying a book. As I understand, publishers are also becoming aware of the advantages of bringing out an online version. It is my intention to put the full contents of the book on the Web, and to bring out a CDROM that contains the complete book, the accompanying Instructor's Guide, as well as the software on which the examples are based. Possibly other software might be included as well. (Apart fromm Netscape, one may think for example of OrbixWeb, VOyager, the Java JDK, the Standard Template Library, and more ...)
Technically, the creation of an online version
should not be a problem.
The software needed for this has already been developed
as part of my research project at the Vrije Universiteit,
An experimental online version of the first version of my book
can be found at
The online version is organized in parts and chapters, like the paper version. From any place in the book any other part of chapter is only one or two jumps away. There are two mode, show modea, which allows for ordinary reading and browsing, and presentation mode that may be used to present the material in classroom. Currently, show mode is only available when using Netscape. In show mode, the arrows on the right may be used to access the material linearly. Presentation mode can be entered either by clicking on the caption of a slide, which results in a slide being displayed in presentation mode, or via the Instructor's Guide, which is reached by clicking on the title of a chapter or section. From there it takes another click on the moving icon to enter presentation mode, from which the sequence of slides belonging to that chapter or sequence can be presented.
As you will see, I have a strong preference for an 'implicit' interface, meaning that there are no redundant indications such as "Click here to enter presentation mode." Although it may take some time to get used to, the average reader will no doubt soon know what to do.
The online version consists primarily of static HTML pages, so that the book may be read directly from CDROM with Netscape. The slide mode makes use of dynamic HTML and is based on the Netscape developers presentation package. (Since many presenters use PowerPoint, I might consider to provide a PowerPoint version of the slides as well. Comments?)
For some selected parts, I might use some more advanced technology, for example plugins to display multimeda. A disadvantage is that it is hard to do this in a platform-independent way. However, provided that the software is included, the book could then still be read from CDROM.