Description:
Scattershot TechTV's Technology Survival Guide contains a little bit of everything, which means it's not too good for anything in particular. Lorna Gentry seems to have targeted her work at people who know their way around a Macintosh or Windows computer, but who don't enjoy their machines for their own sake and aren't technology gurus by any means. Fair enough, but her writing oscillates too much between the super-basic (the definitions of "upload" and "download") and the moderately complicated (editing configuration files with VI in Linux). For that reason, it's likely that this book will alternately bore and confuse you, and that's not good if your goal is to build competence and confidence.In any case, the creators of this book have made a mistake by putting it in direct competition with some excellent online resources. The section on custom building a speedy computer for games is good in the sense that it inspires a bit of confidence in its readers, but bad because there are several topflight Web sites about home-building game machines, and these sites have more current information about products and their compatibilities. Similarly, the author resorts too often to puffy platitudes (about open-source software, Mac OS, or whatever) that make okay reading but don't enable you to do anything new. Overall, you'll find a few gems here--some of the performance enhancement tips are good--but they are, by and large, lost in the flood. --David Wall Topics covered: Aspects of personal computing, including how to shop for hardware, select a high-speed Internet connection, and choose an operating system. More advanced stuff has to do with multimedia and Web site building.
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