It's hard to believe that there was a time--not long ago--when the digital fairyland of commerce, soapboxing, and pornography called the World Wide Web was just a file-sharing tool for nerds, but there's a first time for everything. How the Web Was Born, by CERN's James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, follows the trail from the dawn of ARPANet through the mid-90s, just as the Web boom was beginning to take off in earnest. That may seem like an odd ending point, but the post-1995 story has already been told ad nauseam, and the writers know how to quit while they're ahead. The story is told from widely varying viewpoints and across shifting timelines as the various players are introduced and observed; this adds some complexity to the narrative, but yields a truer picture of the team efforts required to devise and launch the Web. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreesen, Tim Berners-Lee (of course), and many more, figure prominently in the interwoven tales, and are briefly summarized in an abridged cast list at the end of the book, along with a paper and electronic bibliography. The book assumes some knowledge and interest on the part of the reader and saves its big-picture context for the end, but provides reader motivation both by its subject's inherent interest and the recurrent personalization of the story. Neither textbook nor CERN propaganda, How the Web Was Born offers an engagingly networked collection of characters that, like their invention, creates something larger than the sum of its parts. --Rob Lightner