Rating: 
Summary: Great book for a "first timer"
Review: Overall impression:
This book is a GREAT book for a newbie! It contains a wealth of data/information that is very useful to a first time hacker in a clear concise easy to read format. I wish I had a book like this when I started. It would have saved me a lot of searching/posting/getting flamed for asking newbie/loop questions.
It is a good reference book for an experience user. While I am not what I would call an experienced user I am not what I would call a newbie. I learned a lot from reading this book.Likes:
Excellent writing style. I really like the flow of the book.
Embeem who has a known amoung the "hackers" was sited as the Technical Reviewer so I can say that I would trust it's content.
The book is interspersed throughout the book with many "Tips". I like this format. I found quite a few of these to be very good and thought provoking. There were a lot of questions that I never thought to ask but are good to know like "where did the TiVo come from?". This book answers many of the "not asked" questions.
It is relatively Up to date considering the "internet age" we are living in. For example the monte kernel mod is discussed in detail. Additionally, the author has set up a web site that he says he will maintain that will contain updates/new information. This web site exist's right now but is pretty much empty.
The book comes with a CD that has a bunch of stuff on it and is a good series1/2 boot disk. Good and handy stuff to have around.
I like not having to search though 1000 posts to get to the data. I know that most posts such as the monte post is cluttered with a bunch of "I can't get it to work" type of posts. Just having the data without having to filter out all the noise is GREAT. Dislikes:
I can't say there was much I didn't like about this book. There was really only one issue I had with it. The CD that comes with the book does not match the book 100%. For example it describes smb mounting and says the smbfs.o module is located in the hack_dirs/smb directory. There is no such directory. Bill said he would find out why and post an update on the web site. Recommendation:
I would buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: No, no, no... misses the mark completely.
Review: Poorly put together book. Just one example concerns adding a TurboNet ethernet board to a Tivo Series One. I did this myself last year with no book - only info from the Internet. This book claims you have no choice but to hack the software to accomodate TurboNet when in fact, TurboNet drivers are already built into the latest Tivo software. Also fails to cover using the board with standard "off the shelf" wireless ethernet bridges. I'm not impressed at all. Way too convoluted.
Rating:
Summary: If you have a series 2...
Review: Then this is the book for you. Covers everything from drive upgrades to Monte, at a good pace (I'm a linux veteran, so I could have done without some of the slower-paced linux introductory stuff, but this book isn't aimed at someone who knows very much about any computer system, which is a good thing). The descriptions and step-by-step are very thorough, for the most part (although I do feel lucky that my tivo had the backdoor code on the same partition listed in the example in the book, or I might have been severely S.O.L. with regard to changing it as described) and the author talks you through in a very light, amenable fashion. The CD itself is extremely valuable, as it is the only one I have so far encountered that contains all the tools I've read are required (or desired :) to fully hack and upgrade your unit. And it couldn't be easier: if you have a Series 2 tivo, hit enter when prompted (you're also covered if you have one of the 2 different kinds of Series 1 tivos :); linux boots up and you're ready to go. The only thing I would have liked from the linux distro--and I realize it needs to cram a lot of stuff on a CD--would have been man pages for the utils included (come on, you can gzip -v9 the man pages and they are super small!), as it would have helped me tremendously to see all the options and commandline switches for mfstools in detail. I was, before reading this book, somewhat hesitant to open my tivo & make it more the way I wanted; now, I can't wait to get a bigger A drive and go for a monte!
Rating: 
Summary: Not for novices
Review: This book is poorly organized. It has you flipping all through the book and leaving you frustrated as where to begin. I am not a novice. I am a computer programmer with win2000, xp and linux machines and still couldn't figure out where the 3.x tivo kernel is for the 2 Kernel monte method of getting a command prompt on the series 2. This is required to get anything to work on that system. It mentions nothing about mounting specific partitiions (4,7,9) in order to get your drive mounted to your machine. This book needed some serious usability testing from people who haven't hacked a series 2 before. I guess it will make for some good paper for my fireplace. Wait until something better comes out or find better info for free on the internet (which I had to do to get everything working).
Rating:
Summary: Definative resource for the Series 2
Review: This is a great reference for hacking the Series2 TiVo, and the only book out that covers the methods for getting to a command prompt on it. This is significantly more difficult than on the Series1, and it's nice to see a book that covers it. That said, if you have a Series1 then Jeff Kegan's "Hacking TiVo" is probably a better choice.
Rating:
Summary: Definative resource for the Series 2
Review: This is a great reference for hacking the Series2 TiVo, and the only book out that covers the methods for getting to a command prompt on it. This is significantly more difficult than on the Series1, and it's nice to see a book that covers it. That said, if you have a Series1 then Jeff Kegan's "Hacking TiVo" is probably a better choice.
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