Rating: 
Summary: Great update to the first edition!
Review: Much more than just an update to the first edition, the Second Edition of PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide is a very good read. Its obvious that David has grown to love the Palm device as much as any other PalmPilot zealot, and it shows in this edition. Things that were touched on in the first edition are fleshed out here, and there's even coverage of the latest models (including a chapter on writing Palm VII PQAs that is very in depth). NOTE: the chapter on programming was dropped (due to O'Reilly publishing a dedicated programming book)... which I think is good since the topic deserves an entire book to cover. I can't recommend this book enough to both Palm newbies as well as those "in the know."
Rating:
Summary: Not for sharing. Buy another!
Review: My daughter and I both use our PalmPilots professionally. I purchased one copy of this book thinking that I could give it a quick read and sent it on to her. NO WAY!I'll buy her her own copy. This bible is humorous and informative. It's a constant reference and I'll not give mine away!
Rating:
Summary: If you own a PalmPilot, buy this. Simple as that!
Review: My former boss at the computer retailer where I worked was an early adopter of the USRobotics Pilot, as it then was, and I could do little but follow his wise lead. Well, the PalmPilot, or Palm as it now is, has continued to improve and we've both moved on to later models. David Pogue's book is the one I recommended to my customers looking for a book to accompany their PalmPilot purchase. It is comprehensive, well-written, and includes a wonderfully useful CD of add-on software in both free and trial versions. If you own a Palm of any model or version, from the very first 128K Pilot to the latest iterations of the Palm V and VII, you need this book. You especially need this book if you sync your Palm to a Macintosh, as Pogue, Mac enthusiast that he is, is about the only author writing Palm books who has paid much attention to using the Palm with the Macintosh platform.
Rating: 
Summary: The Bible of the PalmPilot, now in version 2.0
Review: My mother always said: "Never write a book bigger than the computer it describes." But do I listen? The new 2nd Edition covers all models, including 1999's the Palm IIIx, Palm V, and Palm VII. (It even explains why all the models have odd numbers!) The book walks you through stunts you never knew the PalmPilot could handle: e-mail, Web surfing, music composition, graphics (even photos), teleprompting, infrared beaming, writing your own PalmPilot software, and much more. At 600 pages, this is by far the most comprehensive Palm book yet written. The enclosed CD-ROM includes 3,100 add-on Palm programs, all in an illustrated, searchable, installable "card catalog" database. If this book doesn't make you think, "I didn't know that!" at least 75 times, I'll be shocked.
Rating: 
Summary: If you've read the Pilot manual, don't bother with this book
Review: Pogue's book contains little of value to anyone who has read the PalmPilot user's guide and played with the machine a little bit. The enclosed CD-ROM contains nothing that can't be found on the Web in a half-hour of poking around, and the database included for browsing the add-on programs is irritating and clumsy. Power users would be much better served waiting for O'Reilly's Palm Development book, expected to ship in November 1998. All in all, I was extremely disappointed by this title and will never again rely so heavily on O'Reilly's reputation in making my book purchases.
Rating: 
Summary: Useful book
Review: Since there are lots of good general reviews already here of this book, I thought I would add a few comments I didn't see elsewhere. Although this is an excellent book, I think most people who buy Palm Pilots and Visors are technically savvy enough so that learning the basic operation of the device or the built-in apps is not much of a problem, which is what most of the book is about. That being the case, I think the best way for most owners to use this book is to do the following. The book has hundreds of undocumented tips and tricks that are worth the price of the book just by themselves. I would just go through each chapter and read these first, and not worry too much about the rest of the text for now. Then later, if you want to go back and read the full description of one of the applications or some other topic, you could do it then. The tips and tricks are set off on each page with a little picture of an owl, so they're not hard to find. I actually read the whole book before this occurred to me, which was fine, but since then I have dipped back into many of the chapters just to refresh my memory on all the great tips and tricks, and I've found this to be a good way to pick up more time-saving short-cuts, or just new, fun ways to use the device. In addition to all the tips and tricks there are several special sections I have to mention just because they're so much fun. These are the descriptions of how to access all the hidden "Easter eggs." There are more of these than I realized. You can learn how to bring up all of them, including the "dancing palm tree," and the little "taxi cab." (The Palm's original project code name was "Taxi"). Since there are several places in the text where these appear, the best way to locate them is to just look up "Easter eggs" in the book index. There is one chapter, however, that I would read all the way through. This is the chapter on hot-synching. There is some good info here, especially on some of the more technical aspects of hot-synching, but perhaps most importantly, on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. If you're an experienced Palm or Visor user, you may have noticed that this process isn't always as straightforward as the regular manual says, and sometimes it does some unexpected or even weird things. Since we're on the topic, I have to mention one of these here. If you're one of those people who have two (or more) Palms or Visors, here is the most important thing you can learn about hot-synching. I experienced this problem before I encountered the explanation and fix for it in this book. (This was worth the price of the book just by itself.) If you have two units and you hot-sync to the same machine or computer, you must give each of the them a separate name in the Palm Desktop software. You do this by clicking on the "User" box in the top-right of the Palm Desktop software program and selecting "edit users." Give the second Palm a different name from the first. Then always use the correct name with each Palm or Visor each time you hot-sync. There is one more gotcha here. In the desktop program you can pre-select the name of which unit is to be hot-synched. However, if you do this from the cradle without the desktop program being launched, it will pop up another dialog box, and at that point you can select which name to use. If you just click on "okay" assuming that the desktop program knows which one you're using, you can still get into trouble. If you fail to give different units different names, and furthermore, to select the correct one each time you hot-sync, the desktop software can become confused, and, as Pogue points out, may hopelessly thrash the information on one or both units. So beware. All in all a useful book for any Palm or Visor owner.
Rating:
Summary: Useful book
Review: Since there are lots of good general reviews already here of this book, I thought I would add a few comments I didn't see elsewhere. Although this is an excellent book, I think most people who buy Palm Pilots and Visors are technically savvy enough so that learning the basic operation of the device or the built-in apps is not much of a problem, which is what most of the book is about. That being the case, I think the best way for most owners to use this book is to do the following. The book has hundreds of undocumented tips and tricks that are worth the price of the book just by themselves. I would just go through each chapter and read these first, and not worry too much about the rest of the text for now. Then later, if you want to go back and read the full description of one of the applications or some other topic, you could do it then. The tips and tricks are set off on each page with a little picture of an owl, so they're not hard to find. I actually read the whole book before this occurred to me, which was fine, but since then I have dipped back into many of the chapters just to refresh my memory on all the great tips and tricks, and I've found this to be a good way to pick up more time-saving short-cuts, or just new, fun ways to use the device. In addition to all the tips and tricks there are several special sections I have to mention just because they're so much fun. These are the descriptions of how to access all the hidden "Easter eggs." There are more of these than I realized. You can learn how to bring up all of them, including the "dancing palm tree," and the little "taxi cab." (The Palm's original project code name was "Taxi"). Since there are several places in the text where these appear, the best way to locate them is to just look up "Easter eggs" in the book index. There is one chapter, however, that I would read all the way through. This is the chapter on hot-synching. There is some good info here, especially on some of the more technical aspects of hot-synching, but perhaps most importantly, on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. If you're an experienced Palm or Visor user, you may have noticed that this process isn't always as straightforward as the regular manual says, and sometimes it does some unexpected or even weird things. Since we're on the topic, I have to mention one of these here. If you're one of those people who have two (or more) Palms or Visors, here is the most important thing you can learn about hot-synching. I experienced this problem before I encountered the explanation and fix for it in this book. (This was worth the price of the book just by itself.) If you have two units and you hot-sync to the same machine or computer, you must give each of the them a separate name in the Palm Desktop software. You do this by clicking on the "User" box in the top-right of the Palm Desktop software program and selecting "edit users." Give the second Palm a different name from the first. Then always use the correct name with each Palm or Visor each time you hot-sync. There is one more gotcha here. In the desktop program you can pre-select the name of which unit is to be hot-synched. However, if you do this from the cradle without the desktop program being launched, it will pop up another dialog box, and at that point you can select which name to use. If you just click on "okay" assuming that the desktop program knows which one you're using, you can still get into trouble. If you fail to give different units different names, and furthermore, to select the correct one each time you hot-sync, the desktop software can become confused, and, as Pogue points out, may hopelessly thrash the information on one or both units. So beware. All in all a useful book for any Palm or Visor owner.
Rating:
Summary: The "tips and tricks" feature is cool
Review: Since there are lots of good general reviews already here of this book, I thought I would add a few comments I didn't see elsewhere. This is an excellent book, but I think most people who buy Palm Pilots and Visors are technically savvy enough so that learning the basic operation of the device and the built-in apps is not much of a problem, which is what most of the book is about. That being the case, I think the best way for most owners to use this book is to do the following. The book has hundreds of undocumented tips and tricks that are worth the price of the book just by themselves. I would just go through each chapter and read these first, and not worry too much about the rest of the text for now. Then later, if you want to go back and read the full description of one of the applications or some other topic, you could do it then. The tips and tricks are set off on each page with a little picture of an owl, so they're not hard to find. I actually read the whole book before this occurred to me, which was fine, but since then I have dipped back in to many of the chapters just to refresh my memory on all the great tips and tricks, and I've found this to be a good way to pick up more time-saving short-cuts, or just new, fun ways to use the device. In addition to all the tips and tricks there are several special sections I have to mention just because they're so much fun. These are the descriptions of how to access all the hidden "Easter eggs." There are more of these than I realized. You can learn how to bring up all of them, including the "dancing palm tree" and the little "taxi cab" that drives across the screen. (The Palm Pilot's original project name was "Taxi"). Since there are several places in the text where these appear, the best way to locate them is to just look up "Easter eggs" in the book index. There is one chapter, however, that I would read all the way through. This is the chapter on hot-synching. There is some good info here, especially on some of the more technical aspects of hot-synching, but perhaps most importantly, on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. If you're an experienced Palm or Visor user, you may have noticed that this process isn't always as straightforward as the regular manual says, and sometimes it does some unexpected or even weird things. Since we're on the topic, I have to mention one of these here. If you're one of those people who have two (or more) Palms or Visors, here is the most important thing you can learn about hot-synching. I experienced this problem before I encountered the explanation and fix for it in this book. If you have two units and you hot-sync to the same machine or computer, you must give each of the them a separate name in the Palm Desktop software. You do this by clicking on the "User" box in the top-right of the Palm Desktop software program and selecting "edit users." Give the second Palm a different name from the first. Then always use the correct name with each Palm or Visor each time you hot-sync. There is one more gotcha here. In the desktop program you can pre-select the name of which unit is to be hot-synched. However, if you hot-sync from the cradle, or by tapping on the hot-sync icon, without the desktop program being launched, another dialog box will pop up, and at that point you must select the correct name to use. If you just click on "okay" assuming that the desktop program knows which one you're using, you can still get into trouble. If you fail to give different units different names, and furthermore, to select the correct one each time you hot-sync, the desktop software can become confused, and, as Pogue points out, may hopelessly thrash the information on both units. The couple of times I encountered this I ended up with all 80 of my utilities and programs scattered around in the wrong menus, or else they all got put into the "unfiled" menu and I had to redo all of them. Also, as my two palms were out of synch by about a week, and unfortunately the unit with the newer information was the one that got over-written, I lost a week's worth of data in my memo pad, datebook, and the other apps. So beware. (For me, this was worth the price of the book just by itself.) All in all a useful book for any Palm or Visor owner.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding practical tips.
Review: Sit down with this book in one hand and your Palm Pilot or Palm III in the other....you'll immediately learn now to make the machine really work for you. You'll find lots of hints that are not in the manufacturer's handbook, as well as step by step how-to use the basic functions. Besides the already installed programs, the author shows you how to download and sample others; many of these are included on the CD in the back of the book. This is a must-have for all Palm users.
Rating:
Summary: Stupendous book & CD-ROM!!!
Review: The book itself is extraordinary enough with its patient yet extremely thorough detailing of all things Palm Pilot (up to the Palm III). BUT THE CD-ROM, W/900 PROGRAMS ON IT BLEW ME AWAY. I was unprepared for its stunningly simple yet complete interface & functioning. Pogue has done all he needs to do this lifetime to earn his ticket into Heaven, as far as I'm concerned. Do no pass up this book.
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