Rating: 
Summary: Good, but could have been much better
Review: If you want to learn the basic to advanced inner workings of a computer, than this book is very good. However, one MAJOR drawback, the illustrations. Some illustrations are drawn superbly: the mouse, keyboard, disks, harddrives, etc. But the internal parts are nothing more than labeled rectangles or squares. ACTUAL photos of a motherboard, pci slots, cmos, video cards, RAM, etc etc should have been taken and included. Read this book, take off the cover of your computer and everything still looks like a strange electronic array. Save your money and tool around the internet.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book - Poor editing.
Review: This is a great book. It has allowed me to fully understand some very complex workings inside my PC. Kudos to Mr white. The editing was poor though. I found a lot of misspellings and poor syntax in some areas that caused me some confusion in understanding the information being conveyed in those particular passages. Whoever edited the draft text needs to work a little harder in their next effort.
Rating: 
Summary: I hope the editor went unpaid.
Review: An interesting and informative if not substantive book. This isn't a complaint, I knew this when I bought it. What I did not know is that it would be so rife with errors. I am on page 52 of the book and have found no less than 5 of them, mostly grammatical. Publishing companies: please, please hire competent editors who have some background in the English language and are also somewhat familiar with the material that is being edited. Here's a real gem, pretty much indicative of the quality of information that is sometimes passed off in the text: "Microsoft, (upon creating windows), could guarantee that billions of dollars of software and business data already created under DOS wouldn't still be usable." Think you were looking for "would" there, chief. So what parts of this book do I trust as fact and not a typo?
Rating: 
Summary: Highly Recommended . . . A+++
Review: If you want to learn to use a computer, this is not the book for you. But, if you have that burning curiosity about what make a PC tick, you could not have chosen a better book. The pictures help to visualize what is going on inside the components. I am an instructor of computers in San Diego, and I have used this book and its previous releases to help me structure my courses. They have been a magnificent supplement. You probably won't get A+ certified with just this book, but as a general handbook on the operation of all the parts that make a comuter tick, this is the ideal book to have.
Rating:
Summary: How Computers Work
Review: I thought this book was exelent for teaching beginners about computers. Buy this book if you are teaching beginners about computers.
Rating:
Summary: Overall, the best computer book I've ever read.
Review: Ron White's best-selling and award-winning book How Computers Work Millennium Edition is nothing short of brilliant. He explains how all of this "pokerfaced" hardware works clearly and often even humorously. The book falls into the category of when something is great, or when someone is really talented, they make it look easy. It conveys how computers work in an extremely effective way with both its illustrations and text. The illustrations make one feel that they can practically understand how the component in question works at a glance, and the text seamlessly and lucidly ensures that the reader knows what's going on in the illustration. One of the best parts of the book, however, are the sections at the beginning of each chapter where Ron White introduces the next part of the computer he is going to cover. In these pages White's writings are not the sidebar explanations that accompany the illustrations -- although, as mentioned, those explanations are very good, too, and left me feeling I really did know what was going on in the illustration -- rather, at the beginning of each chapter, Ron White shows his immense talent as a writer/essayist/humorist. Not only are these sections very enjoyable to read, they also reveal how the illustrations and explanations to follow fit into the big picture of how it all works. The Millennium Edition also has a really interesting part following each section of the book where he predicts how a particular type of computer component might work in the future -- i.e., how printers, multimedia, the Internet, software, storage, microchips, input/output devices, and computers in general will work. Don't know if the predictions will be right, but they're still interesting to think about. There are also timelines in the Millennium Edition which show the evolution of the computer and many of its essential parts, such as the transistor, and there is also a good amount devoted to how software, networks, the Internet, and MP3 works in this 400+ page book, which also comes with an equally absorbing, interactive CD-ROM. After reading the book, I found that knowing how computers work has helped me in my everyday use of computers, too. Somehow, knowing how they work seems to help when dealing with them in general -- there's more of an insidious power in knowing how something works than I thought... How Computers Work has also come in handy -- too many times to recount -- as a good reference book for randomly looking up computer related items and topics in the index, so not only can I find it and know how it works, but I can find out what it is in the first place, and get a sense of how it all fits together. With all of this useful and educational information presented so well and effectively, I would even say that this book is an important contribution to society!
Rating: 
Summary: not for people serious about learning the subject
Review: I already found several other reviews that already say it, and I agree with them all: that this book is full of nice pretty pictures, but lacks explanation. Its more of a book to entertain, than it is to educate. Additionally, the author really shouldn't be making the predictions he does concerning the future of software, as that is clearly outside his area of study.
Rating:
Summary: A good book for most
Review: OK I could have lived with a lot less illustrations. But this one of the first PC books I have found that gives a fair overview of a PC in a fairly easy to understand text. Unless you are looking for a highly technical book on PC's, this is one of the better ones out there. I found it easy reading and informative and would suggest it to anyone that is after a book that covers everything from the power switch to Windows and everything between. Looks like it could be an excellent textbook for persons seeking one for the high school or even middle school level. Only downside? There are some errors that SHOULD have been caught by the editor.
Rating:
Summary: Very good Book , with lots of illustrating pictures
Review: This is a very good book with lots of good pictures. It also includes a nice cd-rom. I would recommend this book if you are lokking for general information about computers.
Rating:
Summary: How this book doesn't
Review: Hopefully some of the kinks are out of this series of books. I admit I have an earlier version. The index is usually wrong, the information scant and the overall knowledge gained minimal. If you like pictures you'll like this book. If you want to learn something significant - keep looking! The only reason I didn't give it "0" stars is because I couldn't choose "0"!
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