With six electronic titles and one in traditional printed format (DNS and Bind by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu), this natty collection of titles is an essential reference for networking managers.

Comprising TCP/IP Network Administration, Building Internet Firewalls, Practical Unix and Internet Security and two versions of a book on Sendmail there's something here to help ease all situations.

Although the titles mainly concern Unix systems the disc installs a Java run-time interpreter to support the search engine included on the disc, which runs on Linux, other Unices, Windows 95/98/NT and Apple OS--provided they have a Web browser available. Once installed you can search on the full text of any or all of the books using search queries with Boolean operators.

When you're looking for information in technical books the limitations of the index are often all too obvious. Not so with a full text search engine. You can find relevant information in seconds. Trying to track down a problem printing from a Linux box to an NT server seemed a fair test of the search feature--and in seconds the screen was full of relevant information. One point though, factor in the cost of a second CD drive for your computer. You'll want to keep this CD permanently available. -- Steve Patient