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The AnandTech Guide to PC Gaming Hardware
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Author: Anand Lal Shimpi
List Price: $34.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0789726262
Publisher: Que (15 January, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 174,850
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Good content, horrible prose
I hold a much more moderate view of this book than many of the reviewers who have written here.PC hardware evolves at an amazing rate. The web provides an up-to-date view of the details, but, it's hard to build a context from web reviews if you don't already have one. Books like this offer context, but are already behind the technical times when they come to press. If you're like me, wanting context and current facts both so you can put together a killer machine when you've never built a PC before, you're going to have to build your understanding from the web and books at the same time. Sad but true.... I think Shimpi's book is the best book out there at providing context. It's deep, thorough, and clearly-thought-through. If you want to watch over someone's shoulder while they build a couple of PCs, then Rosenthal's _Build Your Own PC_ is your book. The thing is, it's just a couple of old designs. The devil's in the details, you know? If your grannie wants context, she should read Chambers' _Building a PC for Dummies_: Shimpi's book goes orders of magnitude deeper (which I crave). If you imagine you'll be upgrading hundreds or thousands of PCs of all ages, you'll want Mueller's _Upgrading and Repairing PCs_: Shimpi's book cuts through the detail to the ideas. The other books I've looked at go downhill from these. If you want to learn enough to build yourself a killer PC, I recommend this book and the web (other reviewers have done a great job listing the best sites). Still, I give the book three stars because the prose is horrible. The majority of paragraphs here contain a sentence or two that don't parse. Laughably unintelligable sentences come by way too often. I hold technical books to a different standard than bestsellers, granted, but this book is bad among technical books. I want the currency of the web, but not the bad writing! Anand, I hope you keep this up to date. I also hope you find a copy editor before you publish V2. Your readers will thank you for it.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Great Book
This book was great, it explained the workings of a computer more in depth but was easy to understand. It helped me learn many things about a computer that i wouldn't have known otherwise.
Rating: 5 out of 5
The perfect AnandTech companion
This book is perfect for bringing moderate PC users up to speed with the more detailed and complex issues of PC hardware.
While advanced PC types will most likely already understand all the material presented in this book, nowhere have I seen it explained more simply.
All-in-all it is the perfect companion to AnandTech.com. Anyone who has read this book will be able to understand all the issues discussed on the website with ease.
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