Customer Reviews

Windows 98: Visual Quickstart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

For seventeen dollars I would have expected a lot more then a glorified version of the little Windows book that comes with a new computer. It's not a bad little book,just not worth the money in my opinion. The book is a mix of very very basic windows concepts explained at a higher user level. For example, page 67 tells us what the Address bar in Windows explorer is for. Now any user who cannot figure out what an address bar is for will not understand an explaination worded like this, "Show the name of the resourcethat is selected in the All Folders pane. Enter a path name or resource name to jump quickly to that disk, folder or resource." If you do not have enough PC knowledge to know what an Address bar is for,then you will have no idea what a "Resource" is or a "Path name". Neither of which are listed in the index, and there is no glossary. As computer teacher looking for a text book for a Windows 98 Basics class, I will not be using this one. Sorry Steve, you missed the mark.

Since I have this book and have used it frequently, recommended it to others and been very happy with the way it shows absolutely everything in pictures, I was surprised at Mr. Ianetto's negative review and I wanted to add my comments to be fair. Out of curiosity, I went to find Mr. Ianetto's problem with page 67 and saw that he pulled out a short caption next to a figure and then criticized it for not being a full explanation of something. But the caption occurs right below another paragraph that does use the term he refers to. I do agree that using "path name" without defining it wasn't helpful, but that was an usual instance. Mr. Ianetto looked hard for something to criticize because the rest of the book is very clear, especially for someone like me, who's just getting started with computers and doesn't have any background knowledge to rely on. I was also surprised that the previous reviewer took what seemed to me to be a nasty swipe at the author at the end of his review. That didn't help at all and made me suspect that the reviewer was maybe reveling in his own sophistication and maybe also relishing writing a negative review.