OASIS Tech Reviews

In this cubicle, you'll find a wide variety of articles and reviews which "take apart" the newest technology and look at what's under the hood. In this month's issue, we're presenting two thorough articles, in which Jacques Morin offers no-nonsense commentary on both Tablet PCs and a series of How-To Tech books (Article below).

Article 1: Who Said it was Easy? (below)
Article 2: Tablet PCs: Write or Not?

Who Said it was Easy?
Article by Jacques Morin

That all depends on your point of view! Most computer users have at one time or another called for technical support to solve an issue. Often, that call results in the kind of interaction seen in Nextel^® walkie-talkie commercials when tech support instantly repairs a broken laptop almost like magic, or when ‘they' come to your desktop and, with a few mouse clicks and some hand waving, all is well again. It would be great if we as users could learn all about the magic behind the blue screen – how does it actually work?

You can find reference manuals in most bookstores on thousands of computer related topics from the ‘How It Works Series' by Queue Publishing for novices to the latest 900 page plus bible on Red Hat Linux.  Many of these titles are several hundred pages long and often as daunting as the problem you might be trying to fix in the first place “…first reconfigure your hard drive partition and make sure its FAT32 not NTFS”…you get the picture.

Well, if you want to learn about computer software or hardware and don't want to read manuals well into the night there is a terrific series now available in the US, published exclusively for Barnes and Nobel by Computer Steps (© Copyright 1991-2004 Computer Step. All rights reserved) in the UK. Barnes and Noble now have this series available for purchase in the US both in stores and online. The list of titles is fairly long! Titles range from MS Word to PHP programming to Networking. For a complete list of titles see http://www.ineasysteps.com.

Why this book rather than the hundreds already out there for consumption? First, the books are only $9.95 (plus tax). Yes, under $10.00! Compared to other titles in the same category – this is a great bargain! So it's cheap…is it any good? The series utilizes lots of pictures and of course words…and a unique style of writing that makes it easy to understand even complicated topics such as PHP and MySQL programming. I recently purchased that book and I use it below to illustrate how easy it is to learn!

The series provides an introduction to topics by explaining what is what…PHP is server scripting language (PHP is Hypertext Preprocessor) and works with HTML…it then goes on to describe what you need to know – the basics and any software you might need in order to learn the concepts and how it all works on your computer. The chapter layouts are similar across the series and generally cover only one topic per section – for example – how to send email using PHP is one topic covers about 13 pages.

Each chapter is written in plain English, yes plain English! Whenever jargon is used it is defined and thoroughly explained. My favorite part of the book and this series are the little icons, sparingly used but very effective, to guide the reader. The three icons are:

                     

The first icon warns the reader – don't try this at home! or to simply exercise caution when learning new topics – especially when installing software or changing hardware settings. The HOT TIP icon provides, well, a hot tip! And the last icon provides extra help to remind readers that this is an important step.

In summary, the series provide excellent visual step-by-step learning with tips and techniques as well as the opportunity to discover things you never knew! The series is suitable for professionals looking for quick results and for novices seeking reliable, simple instructions.

OASIS reviewer, Jacques Morin, gives this series of self-help computer books 4 palm trees out of 5!

   

 

Article 2: Tablet PCs: Write or Not?