2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Poor organization makes this book difficult to use effectively, December 30, 2006
This review is from: Google Talking (Paperback)
I don't use much Google Talk (most of the people I talk to use IRC, SILC, or AIM as real-time chat), but I have had the opportunity to use it some. I was looking forward to this book to see if it would be worthwhile to learn more about Google Talk and how to get more out of it. I have to say that I'm disappointed in the quality of the writing and the organization of the book. The writing tries to be cute and funny, but the clarity suffers dramatically for it (the requirements discussion in Chap 2, plug-ins in Chap 5, etc). Furthermore, the organization of the book jumps around too much, mixing core usage of GTalk and extra uses (ie video or audio chats) too much. If the book had kept a basic theme to it -- put the common stuff up front, then talk about extras slowly and with increasing complexity and rarity -- it would have helped. However, unlike many Syngress books, this one uses screen shots effectively and clearly.
Chapter 1 is sort of what you would expect it to be, an overview of many of the popular, modern chat clients: AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, ICQ. The author slams the competition and champions Google (Google fanboy-type stuff is pretty common throughout the book) as the savior of chat. Sadly, this overview is incomplete and limited, and sets the tone of the book.
Chapter 2 talks about installing Google Talk for Windows users, and spends a lot of time talking about tangential subject matter. This is where the book's main flaw -- poor organization and a lack of clarity -- really starts to show. The book wastes some space on requirements for video and audio chats (which are not core Google Talk uses), and really skimps on the installation.
Chapter 3 talks about using Google Talk for non-Windows users. This chapter is a bit muddled, and perhaps it's because the author isn't a native OS X or Linux user. A couple of things: really, any Jabber client can work (there are dozens), and Gaim is basically the same for Linux and other supported platforms.
Chapter 4 is perhaps the most poorly organized of them all. The chapter skips around in usage, talking about basic chat usage, contact management, then over to music listings, chatting, voice chats and voice mail, file sharing, and so on. The section on personalizing Gtalk is very poorly presented.
Chapter 5 is a lengthy, mishmash of a chapter on plugins. Had the author organized the plugins better this wouldn't have been so bad, but again, the quality of presentation keeps it unclear. I had to look at a few sections a couple of times to try and figure out what was going on, including the section on theme modification. I wound up more confused about these extensions as I went along. Not a very good thing in a book!
Chapter 6 talks about proxies (as you might find in a corporate environment, in a Tor situation, or with SSH tunnels). Sadly, the section on Tor talks more about Tor basics (very incomepletely) than about how to make GTalk work with Tor. Very lousy presentation of how to set up SSH tunnels, too, with incomplete steps at every turn.
Chapter 7 -- GTalk in the Enterprise -- is a neat idea, although it could have been implemented more completely. Because many enterprises have strict IM policies, they will either want to standardize on GTalk or ban it, and so both topics are (poorly, and incompletely) covered. I like this idea a lot, and I think this could have been more completely covered. I think that more books on applications should cover this sort of concept more often.
Two appendices round out the book. Appendix A covers video chats, and honestly should have been included in a standalone chapter devoted GTalk and video (and audio) chats, which would have cut down on a lot of the confusion in the "basic usage" chapter.
Appendix B covers free video calling software, and is kind of wierd -- it doesn't look like these apps integrate with GTalk, but rather would replace GTalk with video. I don't get why they're in the book, to be honest.
All in all not the best book I've read. I don't like writing negative reviews of books, but I have to be honest with this one: it's not well done. The organization is poor (it's downright confusing!), the writing is unclear (it tries to be too cute for its own good), and the coverage is weak and incomplete. If you want to learn how to use GTalk, look elsewhere, this one will not be of much use.
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