Description:
I loved reading this book; I read a good chunk of it, despite its being over 1,300 pages long. It's not that the book is chock-full o' good information, either--mostly, it is--but it seems to have been rushed through editing. It lacks a polish. There are several silly mistakes, such as the random text "Microsoft beta tester T-shirt." Huh? Also, the book occasionally mentions Barry doing this or that in the third person, which makes me wonder if Marcia wrote this book all by herself. A lot of the book gets right to the point. Some of it meanders, such as the various stretches of "dumped" text, which could have been formatted better. The language is plain, and overall the book is well written. I enjoyed many of the sidebars, the style of which seems somehow freer than that of the main text. I was fond also of the Q&A sections--being a big fan of Q&A in my own books. Sometimes the book gets cute, as with many of the punning headlines ("Specs, Lies, and Duct Tape"). Sometimes it's really clever, as in the headline "Should you wait six months to buy or upgrade?"--followed by the single-word paragraph, "No." I like that; it shows honesty from the writer. Then, again, the book has product recommendations, of which generally I'm suspect. Overall, this book lacks the rich history and folksiness of other books in this category, specifically its companion Mac Upgrade and Repair Bible and Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs. I gather that Barry and Marcia know their stuff, but the history and wisdom of the older, original books are missing here. When they're isolated from the others, you don't notice, but once you look at them next to this one it's painfully obvious. On the key issue of hard-disk partitioning, this book does an OK job. It's not that the information is lacking, but that it's all over the place! There's a page on it in the hard-drive chapter, but also information in the building-your-own-computer chapter. And information on the PartitionMagic software isn't indexed under hard-disk partitioning, as it should be. So, I give this book three out of five Phillips screwdrivers. By itself, it's great, but within the category of computer upgrading it pales next to the Mueller text. --Dan Gookin
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