TechRef

Rating:
Summary: It's GREAT!!!
Review: I am a 14 year old and have usued this book to help me build everything from forts to computers, it's GREAT and I would recommend it to everyone!

Rating:
Summary: A must have for everyone!
Review: When I first open this book I thought I was looking at an larger copy of the Pocket PCREF, after reading through it I found that while most of the information included is exactly like the Pocket version there is was more information included.

Large in size and over 875 pages, this reference book includes everything in the Pocket PCREF plus a very extensive glossary, printer control codes and a much larger pc phone directory. Overall a much better value that the Pocket PCREF book.

The material covered is broken down into categories and each category is covered well. The authors take a great deal of time in making sure the information presented is accurate and well documented. For the money this might be the one to have on your desk.

While this book won't fit in your back pocket, it will fit very nicely in a briefcase. An excellent value for the dollar. You might find similar books on the market, but you'll be hard pressed to find any one better. Well Done Sequoia Publishing.

Rating:
Summary: Good, could easily be better.
Review: While this is a very good reference, it leaves a lot of room for disappointment. Perhaps its time to replace the resistor color code tables with summaries of the IEEE and ITU standards, certainly something more needed in the 2001 world of PCs. When was the last time anyone changed a resistor in a PC other than at the component manufacturer site? And it doesn't yet contain a power supply wire color code, which would be far more useful than resistor codes. There is info on Win98 but not on Win2K or ME (or even NT). The processor and socket list is hopelessly out of date. Fixed disk drive lists are way behind the times with only the most minimal information to help keep the confusing IDE/SCSI/EIDE PIO 1/2/3/4/5 ATA33/66/100/133 drive, BIOS, MB chipset and cable standards straight.
This is a good book for troubleshooting, repairing and maintaining the older PC, but it is not even treading water well in a world of P4 or Thunderbird processors, multi-gigabyte drives or 400Mhz RIMM memory. Still, I have to give it four stars (would be 4.5 if Amazon allowed) because there simply is nothing better out there except keeping file folders full of manufacturer specs, white papers and web page printouts.