maintenance repair and upgrading

I bought the book, and read it cover to cover. I learned a lot of stuff and I feel it is responsible for my success. The CD's are terrible though.

I bought this book and proceeded to build myself exactly the computer I wanted with confidence. It gives you enough useful general knowledge so that you don't feel afraid of the terms or descriptions of equipment anymore, and you realize that building a computer is going to be so difficult as you once thought. The author has definite preferences for various manufacturers, and the advice was good, so that I avoided some of the pitfalls of the junk that is out there. It is very informative, useful, and comprehensive. It cannot cover every piece of equipment made, of course, and someone who needs every piece described in detail will not be able to use it as well as someone who can understand the concepts involved. The author cannot be there to hold your hand-you have to have a brain to do the work. I think anyone who would rate this book badly would be someone who wants exactly their situation described, and to be told exactly what to do, because they are fearful or perfectionistic to a fault. The money I have saved using this book is worth ten times the price, and the knowledge I gained is priceless, because now I understand how computer go together.

This book contains a great deal of useful information. The chapters about building a PC or server from scratch were great. Some of the info was difficult to find, a lot of relative information sprinkled among different chapters (IDE drive jumpers, for example, are partially explained in 3 places; you must read all three to feel comfortable working with them)

also, the book only came with one CD (3rd edition) containing a FreeBSD distribution. Half of the ports failed upon installation, and there could be more installation documentation in the book itself (the man pages aren't accessible until post-install). I bombed my Win32 partition installing the boot loader, not real hard to do, needs a lot more explanation.