Customer Reviews

The Rational Guide to Google Blogger (Rational Guides)

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The Radional Guide To Google Blogger is a very good book focusing on the basics of working with Google Blogger. I only wish I had this book when I set up my first blog... it could have saved me dozens of hours. There are a lot of good tips that you wouldn't think of on your own. All in all, for a beginning blogger this is a good investment.

I've never blogged and when a volunteer project I'm working on led me to wish to put up a blog I turned to Google's tools first--free and generally easy to use. I bought Mr. Lee's primer based on comparisons of the available "Getting Started" selections on Amazon. It was useful, although he spends an awful lot of time teaching about getting your blog noticed (RSS feeds, etc.) before beginning to tell the reader how to actually build one. The book did help me overcome my mild technophobia and start creating a Google blog. When I started working with Google's Blogger, though, I soon found that after only 3 years, Blogger has changed a great deal from the version on which the book is based. Blogger today generally makes some things that were not easy to do in 2005 as easy as pie today, so that many complicated instructions in the book are just plain obsolete. Mr. Lee badly needs to revise and update the book. With every passing month the present edition becomes that much less relevant and useful.

The dearth of information you get in this book barely is enough to render it a published book. I'd think it has about as much info as a teacher might hand out to a class during a one-session adult ed. class. This means that if you are so computer challenged that you don't know how to type 'Google Blooger Basics' into your search engine, this book might be of some value, but that probably means you need to learn a lot more about computers than the blogger platform.

It is often amazing how quickly things change in the online world. For example, Google Blogger is a very different animal in early 2009 than it was in 2006 when this book was released.

Wei-Meng Lee, the author of "The Rational Guide to Google Blogger" will hopefully get the opportunity to produced a revised version of his primer.

It's pretty good in terms of writing style and content. Compact, as the publisher's slogan has it, it packs a lot of information into relatively few pages and Lee's style is good. He writes clearly, concisely and directly to the point. Plenty of illustrations provide examples.

A good book rendered obsolete by all the changes Google has made to Blogger.

Jerry