PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson, 059600513X, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Nothing on networking

While dated the book is still a good read. I particularly liked the bit about cleaning keyboard by putting them in the dishwasher then drying them in the oven.

I was suprised to find it had nothing on networking, be it lan or internet. Ethernet is not even mentioned in the index.

Almost there

A new edition of this has just been released so the comments about it being out of date are not relevant (August 2003).

However, after thinking that this book had everything I suffered a creeping feeling that there were omissions, and that was confirmed after I started to use the book. It has everything about PCs in it - what it doesn't have is coverage of hardware specific to laptops or intel servers.

No networking stuff, no Xeon processors, no PCMCIA, no High-end tape drives.

However, if you tinker with or fix desktop PC systems (Windows or Linux) this is perhaps the best reference there is.

Warning

Note that the reviews below are for previous editions. The one here is newly released (less than a month old as I write this). Therefore some of the concerns expressed about it being out of date aren't quite so bad as you might think at this point in time.

Super

excellant book for the novice and the intermediate.

Good info and easy to follow. good for reference for future projects too.

Unfortunately, may be a little outdated as the market is moving so fast.

Overall good bottom line on operating principals and harware.
No software issues are covered.
Internet references to outdated sites and current sites.

OK I guess

if you are a total genious for pcs and hardware, chances are you will not need this book.
If you are trying to learn about pcs and know absolutely nothing abouut them, search another place. If you are of mediocre knowledge, well this book is not for you either. I found this is a very generalized american book ( watch what you say or you'll end up in court) type book.
most of the book was helpful but does not go into detail of the things and how they function. what you should do to troubleshoot etc, etc.
like SCSI buses for example, I purchased this hoping that the SCSI information I could find would help me with the basis and background knowledge I would need to successfully install SCSI cdrom and make it run properly.... forget it, they use terminology that makes you add 1 plus 1 and get 8??????
anyway, troubleshootiing in not covered, no useful photos, and no in depth explinations of how the systems work.

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