This book distinguishes itself from its most popular competitors by emphasising the authors' opinions on hardware products. It's refreshing to see authors recommend Product A for high-performance systems in which price is not an issue, Product B for economical home systems, and Product C for organisational workstations. On the other hand, the recommendations, prices and similar values will change over time. The authors maintain a great Web site where you can find their current recommendations. (The Web site, on the other hand, doesn't include the book's high-quality tutorial on designing and assembling a system from zero.) Even the photographs that appear in this book--traditionally a weak point among hardware books--are clear. --David Wall

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   September 2, 2003
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 Therefore some of the concerns expressed about it being out of date aren't quite so bad as you might think at this point in time.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   May 17, 2003
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

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Unfortunately, may be a little outdated as the market is moving so fast.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Internet references to outdated sites and current sites.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   November 23, 2001
 4 out of 11 found this review helpful

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.