If, like me, you like to poke around inside your computer from time to time, but have trouble keeping up with all of the different kinds of hardware in there, take a look at the recently published third edition of "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson published by O'Reilly.
It ain't cheap ($40 list), but it does an excellent job of explaining how the hardware works, how to buy it, how to install it, and how to fix it. What separates this book from all of the others is that it gives as much emphasis to Linux as it does to Windows. Some of the screenshots even show Mandrake! It's also very much up-to-date for a dead tree publication. For example, the section about Athlon CPU's includes information on the Barton core 3200+ processor. You ask, "Why buy a book when I can ask Tom Brinkman?" Fair question. For one thing, you can take the book in the tiled library to study. While Tom's a nice guy, I don't think he'd go along with that. Disclaimer: My only interest in O'Reilly is that they publish a lot of very useful books. And the pages don't fall out, either. -- cmg
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
