Nearly all new computers come with a CD-ROM drive, a sound card, and speakers, which can turn any computer into a simple CD audio player. You can play your own audio CDs on your computer, but you may have more fun scouring the Internet for free music to play from your hard disk or a CD-R (CD recordable) drive.One reason there are so many free music files on the Internet is the restrictive nature of the recording industry. In the old days, recording artists could only get massive public exposure by signing with a major record label. If they couldn’t get a contract, they were rarely heard by the general public.

USENET is a collection of discussion groups (called newsgroups) available to Internet users. The over 13,000 newsgroups generate over 100M of traffic every day. Of all these newsgroups (which cover every conceivable topic), several are dedicated to Linux. These newsgroups are a useful forum for information and answers to questions about Linux.You can read USENET newsgroups through newsreader software that accesses either the Internet or a local site that offers USENET service (called a newsfeed). Many on-line services, such as CompuServe and Delphi, provide access to the newsgroups (sometimes at an additional cost), and some have their own forums for Linux users. BBSs dedicated to Linux in whole or in part are also appearing, and many excerpt the USENET conversations for the BBS users who do not have access to USENET.

In 1994, an incredibly forward-thinking man named Rasmus Lerdorf developed a set of tools that used a parsing engine to interpret a few macros here and there. They were not extravagant: a guest book, a counter, and some other "home page" elements that were cool when the Web was in its infancy. He eventually combined these tools with a form interpretation (FI) package he had written, added some database support, and released what was known as PHP/FI.Then, in the spirit of Open Source software development, developers all over the world began contributing to PHP/FI. By 1997, more than 50,000 Web sites were using PHP/FI to accomplish different tasks— connecting to a database, displaying dynamic content, and so on.

Netscape has defined a number of versions of JavaScript. Microsoft has released more-or-less compatible versions under the name "JScript," and the ECMA standards body has released three versions of a JavaScript standard named "ECMAScript". The following paragraphs describe these various versions, and explain how they relate to each other. Each entry in the reference section contains availability information that documents the version of JavaScript in which a feature was introduced.