The Book of IRC, by Alex Charalabidis

I am an IRC junkie, so when I saw this book I just had to pick it up.

This book was written in 1999, and it shows. There are outdated server lists and statistics. The attacks described are mostly outdated (who "nukes" "jupes" and "floods" these days? This is only interesting from a historical perspective). The IRC clients described are now of outdated versions, and some of the now popular clients (xchat, irssi) aren't mentioned. The book claims to have a companion website with updates, which I was excited to see, but the site's domain (bookofirc.com) seems to have expired and been snatched up by an unrelated website.

All that aside, IRC is a pretty basic protocol, and most things about it haven't changed a whole lot, so this book is quite useful. It can walk someone new to IRC through the basics, describing what everything in the IRC world is, as well as providing experts with some interesting tidbits. The whole chapters on DCC and CTCP were especially informative to me. Appendix B "Terminology" was great for providing some of the "language" one might encounter in channels with tech/irc-saavy occupants.

The book even touches upon "IRC Netiquette" when it comes to what is acceptable or not behavior-wise in IRC (I think a whole chapter should have been devoted to this, this seems to be a major stumbling block to new IRCers). The fun way in which the author presents this book makes it very amusing to read, not at all like normal techical books (this is something I enjoy about all No Starch Press books).

In summary, this is a very informative book, even for someone like me who has been using IRC for over 6 years, and now run my own server. But it needs a second edition and/or the companion website revived.