Microsoft XP Professional Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Ideal for courses on XP
Review: I don't agree with the previous review. The book is for novice and intermediate users. For people like me, that have little windows knowledge but wanted to set up a start up company, it was excellent. It explains everything in a straightforward language and it's nicely organized so you can use it as reference later.

Rating:
Summary: Will get you started on Windows XP fast!
Review: I don't agree with the previous review. The book is for novice and intermediate users. For people like me, that have little windows knowledge but wanted to set up a start up company, it was excellent. It explains everything in a straightforward language and it's nicely organized so you can use it as reference later.

Rating:
Summary: Ideal for courses on XP
Review: I found the book to be very valuable for an Introduction to Windows XP Professional class I am teaching. Calling it just a compilation of help files is inaccurate; there are many hands-on exercises and insights the author has provided from speaking with actual XP early adopters. In addition the networking sections provide the level of detail necessary for teaching a course that touches on TCP/IP. In fact, the two chapters on TCP/IP are very useful in that they give not just Microsoft's stance on the technology but also the technical background of how standards evolved.

Very useful for training purposes, I give it five stars! Students love it too!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference Book For every XP User!
Review: I've used this book for several classes at my computer school in Dallas and it's great for giving the student a quick overview of the fundamental overview of Windows XP including how to use networked resources. I've found that the chapter on troubleshooting TCP/IP connections was invaluable for teaching the fundamentals of networking technologies. The chapter on broadband technologies is also very valuable when teaching students about networking. I give this book two thumbs up!

Rating:
Summary: Time and Money Wasted
Review: This is a book full of Windows general usage information that targets novice Windows user, very little XP specific, and most of information you better read them from other alternative such as Windows Help which comes for free. It's poorly organized with redundancy and very little insights either technical or historical in the actual contents... One of the bottom 10% IT books clustered the bookshelf with good ones.

Rating:
Summary: Not sure who it's aimed at
Review: This is a strangely variable book. Some sections seem aimed at the veriest tyro, while others (befitting the series title "Administrator's Advantage") seem aimed at an administrator for a local network, though it doesn't seem it provides the gritty information needed to actually work with one. There is little to differentiate XP Professional from XP Home Edition, nor for that matter XP from earlier versions.

Even though this is a short book and cannot cover every topic or command, even those topics covered are done so sparsely, missing the details and nuances that are so important. Two simple examples, one I had to deal with and one I just ran across:

Columbus spends slightly over 2 pages, with 4 illustrations, describing how to add a shortcut to the desktop by invoking the shortcut wizard to browse to a program. (A) Once you know how to invoke the wizard, the detail is hardly necessary, especially for an administrator; or the details of following through a wizard, browsing, etc, could have been covered once at the beginning of the book. (B) Not only program (executable) files can have shortcuts; it's often very useful to have a shortcut to a document. Shortcuts do not have to be on the Desktop, but can be in any folder. (C) He doesn't mention the much more common and useful, in my experience, method of creating shortcuts by right-clicking on the target and dragging to where you want the shortcut created. (D) No mention of other useful stuff like what happens if you move the target.

He devotes slightly less than 2 pages to the operating system's virtual memory (a way of faking large RAM by making part of the hard disk look like RAM), giving a most basic and not very elucidative definition. The only suggestion for optimizing configuration is to change it to "system managed size". Now if it were that simple, why wouldn't that be the default and why would any manufacturer set something different? For a much more useful discussion and suggestions, by an MS-MVP, see aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

There is a fair amount of high-falutin' jargon substituting for operational discussion/definition. About what one would expect from someone who describes himself as "responsible for analyzing and reporting on key trends in the B2B order management area of sell-side e-commerce."

So, recommendations? Though sometimes jargon heavy, this book is simply written, and for a novice to intermediate user may have some useful tidbits. But don't operate under the assumption it discusses everything you'll want or need to know, nor that it is the last word, or even the intermediate word, on those topics it introduces. It may serve to introduce some concepts of networking and other advanced concepts, and has a useful discussion of email (Outlook Express). This may make a useful, non-intimidating intro book, but should not be your last or your only book. It might also be a useful book for the executive trying to understand what the computer department is talking about without wanting to gain the knowledge to actually administer the system.