Characteristics of a good textbook for a general introductory course: It covers the waterfront for the topic, can be read without too much strain by undergraduate students and provides meaningful information. With only 10 chapters, this book cannot really fill a semester, but otherwise it fits the definition.

The first chapter strikes me as too basic and somewhat out of date (readers are advised to have at least 64 MB RAM to view multimedia content, for example). Apart from that, the book delivers a reasonable -- if not riveting -- overview of the field.

De Wolk addresses online searching and information gathering (pages 69-84) and writing HTML (pages 26-31), but allots less than four pages to writing for the Web. He largely neglects links, devoting only two half-pages to them (pages 93, 135-36). He does not address planning for nonlinear story structure. Tips for page or site design take up less than four pages. The author (a former print journalist, now a TV news producer and an educator at San Francisco State University) covers video, audio, photography and information graphics in Chapter 5; he mentions beat reporting but does not explain how to conduct interviews.

A valuable feature: The text includes 10 brief essays by a number of online practitioners such as John Markoff, the New York Times technology reporter, and David Weir, former managing editor of Salon.com. These could serve as a launching pad for class discussions.

I did not examine the book's companion Web site, which provides exercises and examples.

Bottom line: An adequate text for an introductory course in which students may complete a Web project or two, but other materials would be needed to fill out the course.

To Pavlik's "Journalism and New Media"