Preface

It's been many years since Brendan Kehoe wrote Zen and the Art of the Internet to demystify some of the key ideas behind "the Net," including how to use e-mail, share files, and create Web pages using HTML. When Zen and the Art of the Internet was published, Amazon.com was barely a year old. Can you imagine life without Amazon, Netflix, or Google?

More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about the legality of file sharing and whether it promotes innovation or invites theft from movie studios and record companies. Can you imagine modern music distribution without an MP3 player or iPod?

And indeed, this is where our story begins, because file sharing using advanced peer-to-peer networking technology is finally delivering on the promise of "communicating with other nations as if it were a commonplace occurrence." In the same way that the nature of e-mail transformed how we interact on a daily basis, Skype is now changing how and when we call one another, creating new habits of communication as a result.

Traditionally, the act of placing a telephone call required specialized equipment and a dedicated circuit-switched network that callers had to pay to use. Skype uses the Internet as the network, so callers make crystal-clear calls from computer to computer to anywhere in the world free of charge, or from computer to landline (or wireless) phone for a fraction of the cost. And in countries where the telephone infrastructure is outdated or not well developed, Skype makes the experience of calling to and from these places better. The process is reliable; the quality is better; and communicating is dramatically less expensive.

Skype is the fastest-growing communication service in the world, with more than 75 million registered users and more than 150,000 new users being added each day. Like the advent of e-mail, the Skype phenomenon is changing the way we communicate. It's changing how we organize communications and how we incorporate new technology into the patterns of our personal and professional lives.

Our hope is that this book will help you understand Skype and the basics of the technology. If you're not yet using Skype, this book provides easy-to-follow steps for installing and using it effectively. If you are already using Skype, this book shows you how other people are taking advantage of it and how to optimize your own use of Skype.

Harry Max and Taylor Ray

Mountain View, California

[e-mail]

Target Audience for This Book

This book is both for people who are new to Skype and for existing Skype users who want to optimize their use of Skype. This book is designed to get new users up and running quickly on Skype, and for existing Skype users, this book offers a comprehensive explanation of Skype's features and functions. For network administrators and IT personnel, this book covers Skype's architecture and security model, as well as advanced configuration topics.

How This Book Is Organized

Chapters 1 and 2 present the essence of what you need to know to understand, install, configure, and use Skype using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Chapters 3 and 4 provide in-depth installation and configuration procedures for beginning computer users and for users of the Pocket PC and Linux operating systems. Chapter 5 describes how to use all of Skype's features and functions. Chapter 6 describes how Skype is being used all over the world, and Chapter 7 outlines the steps to take when Skype is not working properly. Appendixes A, B, and C cover more technical topics: the Skype architecture, security model, and advanced configuration.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the many people who made this book possible. First and foremost, we need to thank Dennis Allison for his prompting, guidance, encouragement, and support. We also wish to thank Howard Hartenbaum, without whose unwavering support this book simply would not have been published, and Niklas Zennström, who gave us the green light to move forward.

We thank Karen Gettman, executive editor at Addison-Wesley, for her flexibility, clear direction, and patience. We wish to thank the amazing Skype team, in particular Kurt Sauer, for his dedication and lucid explanations; David Rosnow, for answering questions at all hours; Henry Gomez, Kelly Larabee, Janus Friis, Stefan Oberg, and the awesome Skype developers, for creating such excellent software; and Pooj Preena, Bertrand Lathoud, and the rest of the Skype team, who made this book a priority.

We would also like to thank Sheri Cain, our developmental editor; Nikolai Lokteff, our illustrator; the supportive staff at Pearson Education; and our stellar reviewers, without whom this book would be quite unintelligible.

Special thanks also go to our friends, family members, and associates, who often endured "the book excuse" for many months on end. In particular, we want to thank James Taylor (the chemist, not the singer), Mother Sue, Papa Bruce, Lisa Taylor, Beth Ann and Susie Allen, Ann Swanberg, Judith Gable, Chris Miller, Jim LeBrecht, Michael Ehrenberg, David Bell, Todd Cotton, Richard Chuang, Mike Min, Ken Bielenberg, Mark Finnern, Jonathan Simonoff, Jeff Beale, Mark Interrante, Bo Holland, John Perry Barlow, the Information Architecture Institute board of directors, and Nick and his gang at Dana Street Coffee Roasting Company.

Last, we want to recognize Adobe Systems for supporting Adobe FrameMaker, the best professional word-processing software available, period.