It's written for smart people who were trained to read and write and think on an advanced level. I don't mean that it's for geniuses, but I'm not aiming at people who didn't do well in school.

My experience (as someone who has interviewed many candidates for jobs in Internet tech support) is that technical people who apply for tech support jobs are not thinkers. Non-technical people who apply for it are thinkers and do much better than the technical people. This is not only because they read and think, but because they are willing to work to learn.

If you're someone who reads more than other people, thinks about things, writes about things, and you have a strong work ethic -- in short everything that made you a success in school as an English major or as a liberal arts or social sciences person, this book is written with you in mind.

I go back and forth on whether it's a good title. I could have called it something like A Career in Internet Networking for Smart People Who Didn't Major in Computer Science, for example. Most of the titles I came up with to try to convey the whole idea were obscenely long. So I compromised with the shorter title it now has and I hope that people who are not English Majors will still see themselves in the idea "English Majors".

Heavens, no! I went to school in CS for a year before changing majors and I've worked with brilliant CS people. But most of them went into programming, in one form or another, not into networking. I've had the great pleasure of working with some fantastic CS-trained networking people, too, but they don't wind up interviewing for tech support jobs. The really smart ones get hired via the old boys network right out of school or right after they show how wonderful they are in their first job.

A reader of Networking for English Majors isn't competing with the best that CS has to offer. He or she is only competing with the CS people who were unable to get a leg up through the old boys network and have turned to Internet tech support for a job. The number of talented people in that very restricted set is vanishingly small.

No, Networking for English Majors makes it a lot easier and it's certainly a manageable task, but it's still work. You have to read and think. But you're already good at that and you can definitely succeed in this. Meanwhile, we're talking about less than 200 pages. You had to read much longer, much denser things in school -- probably for most of your classes.

No, it teaches you everything you need to know to get a job doing Internet networking support. Networking isn't rocket science. Networking for English Majors teaches you what you need to know for you to be good at a job in tech support from day one, but there's a lot more to the career path than tech support. You want to advance quickly to being a network guru. There's lots to learn to accomplish that, and you'll have to read more than just this book. But again, you're good at reading and learning. Networking for English Majors will lay the foundations you need to learn and grow.

Please email me. You can get to an email web form through the "Contact the Author" clickie at the bottom of every page. I want to improve the book. I want you to understand. I want you to succeed.