Newbies, read this!

Welcome to SunWorld Online! Read this page if you've never visited us before, or if you visit so many sites you've forgotten what we're up to. This is an electronic magazine published by IDG Communications, the world's largest publisher of computer-related information. Our sister titles include Macworld, PC World, and Computerworld, as well as 225 others.

The chuckleheads behind the html here are the editors who brought you SunWorld and Advanced Systems magazines. Like a paper magazine, SunWorld Online includes news, columns, features, letters to the editor, reviews, and advertisements.

We've worked out a deal with Sun Microsystems that allows us to put SunWorld Online on Sun's home page in exchange for (get this) Sun paying for the disk space and the extra network lines our traffic will consume. (We said it really fast so it made perfect sense to them at the time.)

Well, our arrangement is a little more complicated than that, but the important point to remember is we are independent of Sun, and we write to make readers happy. You have plenty of opportunities to tell us how we are doing with that promise using the response forms after each story. Of course, you can always send us a message at editors@sunworld.com too. This is your pulp-free, digitally fortified, all-electron, monthly magazine, so tell us how to serve you.

Keep these tips in mind as you read our magazine:

• If you like SunWorld Online, please complete our subscriber form. We'll send you an alert of each new issue along with our table of contents each month, plus notices of late-breaking stories.
• If you want to add SunWorld Online as a hotlink, use this address: http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/. We keep SunWorld Online's current table of contents in this directory.
• We place an abstract at the top of each column and feature so you can decide at a glance if a story suits your needs.
• You might prefer to read longer stories on paper, so we've made our sidebars and figures hyperlinked like you'd expect, and added them to the bottoms of the main stories so you can print everything with one command.
• Many readers will want to browse SunWorld Online like a paper magazine; one story after another. At the top and bottom of each page is a button that says, "Next story," this refers to the next story listed in the table of contents.

Here's how we've organized SunWorld Online:

News

If you want up-to-the-nanosecond news, turn on your radio or CNN. If you want insight into events and products that affect how you use SPARC and Solaris, read SunWorld Online's News section. We change the news every month, and update and post major news stories as they break.

New Products

Keep up with the latest products that work with SPARC and Solaris. We squeeze vendor's press releases down to their pith (the releases, not the vendors) and arrange them by category. Updated weekly with the newest products appearing first. Eventually, we'll make it searchable, too.

Features

For help in understanding the technology behind today's Unix-based, client/server world, look no further than SunWorld Online's Features.

Columns

Our News department tells you what's hot, our New Products section tells your what's new, and our Features department tells you what's important. How does one apply what's learned? Turn to our Columns section.

We've got top-notch pros in the field covering security, system administration, client/server computing, PC connectivity, software development, and running Unix systems as heavy-duty enterprise servers. For your personal career development, a recruiter answers reader questions about careers in Unix.

Services

Includes sunWHERE?, our free e-mail notification service, this page, and our staff list.

Navigational tips

1. There's no place like it. Since a bunch of print journalists put SunWorld Online together, we call our Home Page a "table of contents" (TOC). Call us quaint, call us old fashioned, call us crazy, but call our home page a TOC.
2. Buttons, we've got buttons. For the comfort and safety of our guests, we clearly mark all exits back to our table of contents. We also offer buttons to the next story in that section, if you'd rather read SunWorld Online like a paper magazine.

3. Number 3. There is no number three.

4. Hello? You'll notice a reader feedback mini-survey at the end of each story. Use said survey to offer your instant responses to each article. Your responses are important!

5. Forget not, want not. Fill out the registration form and we'll send you a table of contents each month, plus notifications of astounding events as they transpire.

What's with those icons?

That big graphic at the top of our table of contents ("Home Page" to you WWW purists), has hot spots you can click on to jump you to different sections of our magazine. (Web geeks call this a "linked image map.") You'll note at the bottom of our table of contents we've a row of icons. Here's what they mean:

Tells new readers everything they need to know about using and navigating SunWorld Online. A file very similar to this one.

Stand up and be counted! Fill out our latest reader survey and give us a piece of your mind.

We publish every month (with some mid-month updates). Want to make sure you don't miss an issue? Just sign up for our e-mail alert system by clicking on the Subscribe button. In exchange for you filling out a brief form, we'll send an alert of each new issue along with our table of contents each month, plus notices of late-breaking stories. No charge, no obligation -- we just want to make sure you don't miss an issue!

sunWHERE. Pop quiz: True or False? We talked about sunWHERE earlier on this page. Answer: True! It's our little homage to Yahoo.

Letters to the editor. Uh... you figure it out.

Since Sun is nice enough to to let us put our stuff on its site (thus using Sun's disk space and network bandwidth) we put a link to Sun on our table of contents.

Advertise to the most powerful buyers on the Web.

Wow, you can read our biographies, look at our mugshots, get our PGP signature blocks and fingerprints, and send us e-mail. Please don't click on our heads.

If you have problems with this magazine, contact webmaster@sunworld.com
URL: http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/common/swol-newbie.html
Last updated: 1 March 1996