A GPS User Manual: Working With Garmin Receivers [Paperback]

Dale Depriest (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: 1st Book Library (June 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403398240
• ISBN-13: 978-1403398246
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #942,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you tinker with Garmin GPS devices, you probably want it., November 20, 2004

By 

C. Bailey "cbailey139" (Maryland United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A GPS User Manual: Working With Garmin Receivers (Paperback)

I'm enjoying this book. If you are interested in playing around with Garmin GPS devices (GPS is a sort of hobby for many), you probably want to get it, and the 4 star rating is for you. However, if you want a book about GPS in general or about brands other than Garmin, this isn't the book you want.
Much of the book amounts to a more detailed owner's manual than what Garmin gives you. It covers handheld units pretty well but is not intended for other GPS device categories like aviation. In covering many different models, it also accomplishes a lot of comparison between their user interfaces and other features. I like that it does a better job than Garmin's manuals of explaining how to think about the user interface - that is, the strategy behind it.
There's also info on using Garmin software, and some explanitory info on things like DGPS and WAAS, the NMEA interface, external antennas, and similar related stuff. There's an entire chapter on secret keystroke sequences that access undocumented abilities (not that these are all that powerful). I would have liked more of this ancilliary information, more depth and variety, but did appreciate what there was.
One unusual downside: this book may have the most typo's of any I've read. I bet there's about one per page, of the sort where another word is substituted ("use" instead of "user", "you" instead of "your") as if they only used a spell check. But that hasn't interfered much with using it.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better than the Garmin manual, February 12, 2006

By 

William C. Waggoner "ctgreybeard" (Bethel, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A GPS User Manual: Working With Garmin Receivers (Paperback)

I bought this so I could learn more about my etrex vista C. The book is a little out of date for the more recent GPSrs but is still generally applicable. I did learn many things from it. One thing, though, is that it tries to cover a very wide range of units, this leads to a lot of variations in the instructions and it gets pretty repetitive. There are also a large number of typos in the book. Things like "you" instead of "your" and "an" instead of "and." They clearly used a spell checker but didn't have the benefit of a good proofreader. This really didn't take too much away from the value of the book but it didn't improve it either.

If you have a Garmin handheld then I would recommend this book.

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars GPS User Manual: Working with Garmin Receivers, July 29, 2005

By 

Robert P. Shore - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A GPS User Manual: Working With Garmin Receivers (Paperback)

By the title of this manual I assumed that the book would cover the Garmin GPSMap 60CS. It did not! Therefore the twenty five bucks that I spent was wasted and all I have now is another dust collector.