This is a thorough introduction to creating videos for YouTube, aimed at the absolute beginner. It is especially strong on explaining how to tell a story and on how to behave yourself as part of the YouTube community. The emphasis is on making art, not on making money.
It is not a techie book. There's a long chapter called "99-Cent Film School" that covers the mechanics of creating a video, but it's very basic and deals mostly with the selection of equipment, with some discussion of editing. The book is unusual in that it is not Macintosh-centric: the authors use Windows and claim there's no need to consider Macintosh because Windows is cheaper and has more software.
The authors summarize their position on p. 248 as "Don't watch the media, be the media." This is a good sound bite and gives the flavor of the book, although it is not really accurate since they encourage watching and commenting on the videos of other YouTubers. (Besides, if no one watched the media, would there be any media left?) The authors detest traditional media, especially television, and they detest much of the new media too. This doesn't have much impact on the book, except to cause occasional outbursts of gratuitous nastiness. For example, on p. 244 we read, "Social networking provides websites to people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer." Although there's some truth in this, it is unnecessary to state it here. The isolation from other media also gives the impression that YouTube is its own universe, with no connection to anything else.
The nastiness comes out in concentrated form in the Preface, which attempts to explain "Why You Should Buy This Book" by trashing the competition. Be sure to skip this section of the book! It's not representative of the rest and reading it will turn you off from an otherwise-good book.
There are a number of rough spots that could have been improved by better copy-editing. The book is somewhat rambling. Although it does explain all the YouTube and computer jargon, it may use a term many times before defining it. For example, the term "partner" is used throughout the book but is not explained until Chapter 11. The index is often no help; "partner" is not in the index as such (you have to look under YouTube Partners), and acronyms such as RSS and NLE are not indexed at all.
YouTube URLs are cryptic pseudo-random character strings, and a Very Good Feature of the book is that the authors have placed every URL as a hyperlink on one page on their web site, so you just have to click it. This is not quite as good as feature as it could be, because the cryptic URLs on that page are not annotated other than with a cross-reference number such as "URL 9.3"; if each had a short description or title the page would be easier to navigate and would also be great for browsing.
