Integrating the Smart Home & Its Owner, Books 1 and 2

Rating:
Summary: makes a complicated subject easy
Review: A lot of these books only cover X10. This one took a good look at a lot of home automation products and brought them all together in a really easy to understand way. The illustrations of the installation made things even easier to understand.

Rating:
Summary: An easy and helpful read
Review: I was looking for a way of getting some things done at my home without spending a ton of cash, & this book helped me exceed my goals. If you're looking to spend 20 grand, you probably want to go another route (like hire someone), but I wanted to do stuff myself. True the pics are black & white, but I didn't find it a problem. Book starts with basic info in case you don't know much, and follows a complete install that controls A/V, Heating & A/C, security, cameras & webcams, computer networking & other. Uses the JDS Stargate. By the way, I personally enjoyed the writing style. A bit of humor doesn't hurt in a technical book.

Rating:
Summary: poorly edited, poor pictures, and "cheap feel"
Review: My wife and I are planning on installing some home automation features in our 4 year old home (whole house audio, security cameras, LAN, etc.), so I thought this book might be helpful. While it did have some interesting information, it was a very simple book. The font was very large so that a "short book" with limited information could be made to look bigger. There were several typos in the book and there weren't even page numbers! I finished the book in about 2 hours. There were lots of black and white photos, but their quality was so poor that I had a hard time discerning the details the author was attempting to point out. Also because the photos were of low resolution and B&W, you have no reference when the author says things like, "the blue wire in the photo." Save your money on this one unless you need some scripts for the JDS Stargate system (which you can get online free in the forums anyway.)