Peter Norton's New Inside the PC

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous. Belongs on every computer user's bookshelf
Review: My comments are based on the 1999 Eighth edition. This 2002 edition is similar.
This book is fabulous. No argument possible, it's a great book. It may be better for suited to some experience/interest levels than others, but by any standard it's an excellent book.

It's like an "Encyclopedia of the IBM-PC," but with in depth treatment of the topics. If you've ever wondered what any acronym (PCMCIA, e.g.) means, you will find it in this book. The difference is that whereas another book may explain that acronym with only a sentence or a paragraph, Norton gives you seven pages on that and related technologies including: ATA protocol, CardBus, Card Services, CIS, flash, Media storage format, Socket Services.... Multiply that level of detail times every computer acronym you've ever wondered about and you have a valuable resource.

The book is an in-depth overview to the PC. You get deeper coverage of each topic then you would normally get in a book of this type, and therein lies the main value. Still, since it's an overview, if you want to dig into a topic you are given excellent references to external sources.

As expected, given Norton's roots in the disk utilities area, great depth is given to the subject of hard and floppy disks and their structure and organization. You won't find a better or deeper treatment of this material anywhere other than Norton's materials. If you want to understand the FAT, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, master boot block, master boot record, partition table, etc., this is the place.

The book targets beginners to experts, and I think that's a strength. Beginners get introductory material (like what is a byte or a serial cable) explained, while experts get deep treatment (like why a 16550A UART is better than a 16550 p429). That makes this single book a great reference for anyone, especially a newbie. You may have to study some pages carefully or even look up external resources, but isn't that unavoidable?

Sadly, tragically, this book is left over from an earlier, better, time of computing. The first edition of this book is from a day when you owned your own computer, not Microsoft. In that day, fun, excitement, experimentation, discovery, fascination, and programming the hardware yourself were still part of the equation. In that day it was popular to use a tool like DEBUG and poke around in the portions of memory managed by the operating system and really understand what was going on. Now, Windows is so complex and sophisticated that poking around like that is of limited usefulness. Still, tell me where are you going to get anyone to tell you about DEBUG or using I/O ports to talk to the CMOS or real-time clock these days?

Also the info on understanding the hard and floppy disks, while fascinating, is of limited use in modern times. Back in the day when a 10MB hard disk cost you $1000, yes, you might take the time to use DEBUG to poke around the sectors and repair the partition table. In modern times I would not do that. I would just go to "Best Buy" and buy a new one for $50 and use the other 2 days of my weekend for reading this excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Very informative
Review: PC and associated technologies change very rapidly. I am a software engineer and not very hardware savvy, and when I go to Fry's shopping for a PC, I am at a total loss - how much Video memory is adequate, what is a PCMCIA slot that laptops tout, what is SDRAM - what are my alternates, should I get an AMD Athelon or a Pentium Pro, whats USB 2, what are the differences between a TFT LCD and a regular CRT and whats this new Firewire I see advertised these days. This book covers all these and more for the layman. And they are covered well.
You will find this book very useful if you are not very hardware savvy like me. This book is not cheesy - it doesn't cover a lot of topics just to sell. The topics are covered just enough to give you an idea that there is such a thing out there, and if you really want to do a PhD about it, there are detailed books out there.

The language is informal. Its good in a way and bad. Sometimes some statements are not very clear. I also found a good number of typos (I don't know if was the Edition I bought).

But otherwise a good book.