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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
30 editions...,
By Jeff "Xodmoe" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Secret Guide to Computers: 28th Edition (Paperback)
...and I get to be the first to review "Secret Guide"!Russ Walter's "Secret Guide to Computers" covers several computer-related topics including hardware, software, the Internet, programming, the people who are likely to use computers, the history of computing and more. Since 1972, "Secret Guide" has undergone several revisions. The most recent was the 30th edition and was released earlier this month (September 2007). The current "Secret Guide" as well as earlier editions include informative buyers guides to contemporary systems, hardware components and recently-released software as well as older programs that might be available from online retailers, but not on the store shelves anymore. "Secret Guide" also has sections on how to work with computer operating systems, mostly recent versions of MS Windows, but also covers MS-DOS, and Mac OS X. These combined with chapters on how to get by when using MS Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook and how software, hardware and users work together in easy-to-understand language make for a good introduction for people who are new to these subjects. The author, Russ Walter, comes from a technical background, especially computer programming. In the early days of micro-computers (before PC's), people who used computers were expected to understand something about how files and data within were managed and accessed, even if they didn't work in a data-processing department. The 29th Edition of "Secret Guide" (2004) is 607 pages long and the sections on programming take up 209 of those pages. If you're interested in programming, the chapters on languages are a good introduction to why programming languages as well as computers in general work the way they do. The downside to the above is that so much of the sections about programming are rather dated as of the 29th edition. Of the 209 pages on programming, 97 of those pages are a tutorial about a language called "QBasic" which came as a free feature with MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, but has since been available only as an obscure download. The tutorial is extensive and comprehensive, but its usefulness is debatable as many of the principles might not apply when learning programming languages that are taught and used in 2007 (such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and newer versions of Visual Basic). Also, the tutorial on Java seems to require Visual J++, which was Microsoft's implementation of Java and was sold with Microsoft Visual Studio 6. Visual J++ is no longer available for sale, and the Sun Java Development Kit has been available for free download since 1995. The section on C++ requires MS Visual C++. Earlier editions of "Secret Guide" covered the C language, but also required Microsoft C compilers and IDE's (Integrated Development Environments - user interface programs). In future editions, I'd be interested in similar chapters covering languages such as Perl, PHP and other languages that don't need Microsoft interpreters, libraries, compilers or environments. Walter offers chapters with articles about key persons in the history of computing such as Charles Babbage, Grace Hopper, on down to Gary Kildall, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I'd like to see more about folks like Richard M. Stallman, Larry Wall, and of course, Linus Torvalds. "The Secret Guide to Computers" is a good book to buy if it's a first or second book about computers. ...but not the last one.
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