Customer Reviews

Windows 7: The Definitive Guide: The Essential Resource for Professionals and Power Users

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The publisher O'reilly is normally the standard on well written technology books, (well in depth well written technology books). This book however was not what it is advertised as. It does not provide you with "everything you need to manage and maintain Windows 7" in fact, it is simply a basic user's reference at best.

Rather than rant however, I will simply point out that the brand new to windows 7 UAC receives one short very brief chapter that fails to cover how to manage the available programs on the start menu for different user accounts on the computer, but devotes nearly half the book to the basic functions of Internet explorer, movemaker and several other generic Microsoft programs that are installed with the OS automatically, (yes the author does tell the reader how to uninstall them).

For the basic user, there are other books that cover the workings of windows 7 in much easier to read detail, and certainly video tutorials online for everything covered within this book. For power users and those of you who know how to change the home page on IE or can change the resolution to your monitor without needing a screen shot to make sense of the menu, there are certainly more detailed titles out there.

Very Disappointing

Windows 7 does have quite a learning curve. There is a tremendous amount of information on Windows 7 (938 pages) in "Windows 7 - The Definitive Review". The small index (20 pages) is not sufficient for such a large volume. I was looking for how to change my mouse from double-click to single-click. I could not find the solution under MOUSE or SINGLE-CLICK or DOUBLE CLICK. Eventually, I found the solution listed by way of FOLDER OPTIONS but not detailed in the index.

I have been frustrated each time I go to this book for information. I NEVER find the information. It's beyond me how he can write so many words and say so little. Probably my biggest disappointment is the Index. I have NEVER gone to the index and found what I was looking for. I'm a long time user of Microsoft Windows products, so I'm already familiar with most of "how it works" topics, so it amazes me how this author can write much and leave me hanging wanting for more details. I cannot recommend this book.

O'Reilly media has long delivered information technology professionals and regular users definitive resource books for all manner of technology products. They are comprehensive, informative, and presented with orderly structure and excellent readability. "Windows 7: The Definitive Guide" by William F. Stanek sustains this tradition. While the book's subtitle says it's intended for "professionals and power users", any informed technology consumer who wants to improve their relationship with Microsoft's newest operating system can benefit from this. At 900 plus pages, few areas of Windows 7 go unexplored.

Stanek treats his readers as intelligent (rather than as "dummies"), and offers occasional light touches in his text that are amusing without being flippant. He smartly lays down the differences between Windows 7 and both XP and Vista, and provides detailed yet understandable discussions of improvements (or otherwise) in Window's 7 user experience.

There are no serious issues with this book. There may have been a better approach to the arrangement of content. The chapter on installation (and some of the related technical discussions of boot devices and drive partitions) do not appear until page 859. Since many early adopters of Windows 7 will be upgrading from other versions of Windows, this chapter may have been better placed before discussions of the new interface and features. As the table of contents is well arranged the and the indexing thorough, this is a minor quibble.

If you anticipate a long-term relationship with Windows 7, this book will certainly increase the likelihood of it being a harmonious one (or at least leave you with an understanding of where things went south).

Combine this book and David Pogue's Windows 7: The Missing Manual (scheduled for release in January), and you'll posses an outstanding reference library to assist in keeping the upper hand on Windows 7.

I must confess in advance that I usually buy the "Missing Manual" books for a computer system. However Windows 7 is out and that book is not, so I got this one based on the favorable reviews here. Now that I've set up my new computer and have read thru most of this book (seriously, I really did) I don't think this is the book most people are looking for. I think I'm reasonably technically proficient, but this book seemed to assume a lot of knowledge of techie jargon which may be over the level of the average user. But more importantly for the user looking to buy just one book as both an intro guide to the new Windows 7 features and a reference for troubleshooting, I think this book falls a little short on both measures.

One thing every buyer of a new computer is going to be doing is migrating their old files and settings; near as I can tell, this gets exactly one paragraph worth of explanation on page 15. I had a trouble with some of my programs like Itunes, and I had to use google to figure out what to do instead of this book. As for usability explanations, Windows 7 has some keyboard and mouse shortcuts for doing useful things like hiding all the windows or all except the currently active one. As I read thru the book I marked pages I'd want to refer to again for stuff like this, and I never found a description of these. And I had trouble getting a Tivo box to talk to my computer; while on page 627 it did mention the 1st thing is to turn on logging (which I did and helped me solve the problem), this is one area I think many people are going to run into issues and it deserves an expanded explanation of how to interpret the log and solve issues. Again, I had to turn to google.

To sum up, this is a nicely written book with lots of info but I think there are going to be better books out there; if you are going to buy only one I'd suggest looking closely at the alternatives.

This book explains things in such a way:

the Balance power scheme: it is a balanced scheme to have power management.

write to multiple DVD-R: after it has finished burning the first disc, take the first disc out, and then, put in the second disc, and repeat the steps until all discs are finished.

(so if you had thought you are supposed to jam all discs in, then it would have been helpful)

it is a very in-the-box type of generic manual. It is not really so Definitive either, as the topic on Virtual PC, XP Mode, and how much space we can shrink down a hard drive volume is explained only as a beginner's perspective, but not advanced at all. For example, the amount the hard drive can be shrunk down by the Disc Management Tool is affected by how much fragmentation the disk has and by the pagefile's location on the drive, not necessarily the total free space of the drive.

Another book, Windows 7 Secrets, on the other hand, has a lot more insight, if that's what you are looking for.

O'Reilly Publishers has recognized the need for at least two types of guides to this important Operating System and one of the major software releases of 2009. While their Up and Running Guide by Wei-Meng Lee is succinct and valuable, those of us who advise others on technology; want to solve perplexing problems involving networking, security, systems customization or unusual hardware environments need a reference of this sort to rapidly and efficiently solve the unique problems involved in making an OS work with an unusual systems configuration or application. Modern operating systems in general consisting of literally millions of lines of software which must interact with a variety of hardware and virtual devices in an amazing variety of applications require an excellent well-indexed and illustrated guide to system customization and knotty problem solving. William R. Stank and O'Reilly have not shrunk from this duty and have provided a clear, comprehensive and well-explained guide to these difficult tasks. While there are oldsters who yearn for the days of Unix System 7 where the entire software structure of an operating system could be comprehended in source code, those were also the days of OS 360 (which required extensive debugging and customization). Clearly modern operating systems which provide a beautiful interaction environment and which must contend with a variety of hardware quirks and application environments require a clear and extensive guide to tuning, customization and debugging. This is an excellent, easily understood and complete reference guide that addresses the needs of a user or consultant who must exercise the advanced features and distract the Demon's (not Daemon's) of Microsoft Windows 7.

--Ira Laefsky

I got this book in December when I got my new computer. I haven't read all of it yet, but everything I have read has been excellent. I've never highlighted so much before.

I thought this was a good read. It kept me interested and I learned so much from it. I would recommend it to anyone on Windows 7.

I have looked at several books in person about Windows 7 and did not find any that I liked. I went to Amazon and looked for the "O'Reilly" publisher type of book because they have the "good and the bad" about any topic. The author William R. Stanek does a great job in explaining the various topics and gets to the point without beating around the bush. I am learning about Windows 7 because I need to support it for work and needed a book that I could learn from. I found this book to be my one source book for all about Windows 7.