The Friendliest Computer Club in Ventura County Since 1986
PC Annoyances
This is a reprint from the July 2005 issue of TOE (The Outer Edge)
Review By Toby Scott
PC Annoyances, by Steve Bass, published by O'Reilly. ISBN 0-596-00593-8; U.S. $19.95.aa,/pa.
Steve Bass has created a truly useful book. There are lots of "tips and tricks" books around, but finding useful tips has been difficult in the others I have read. He has found a clever way to organize the information. Each chapter is the usual different topic (e-mail, Windows, Internet, Microsoft Office, etc.), but then the content is organized by degree of difficulty.
What makes this work is if you are a beginner, just start reading until things get difficult to understand. Then go on to the next chapter. If you are moderately skillful, skim the first group until you see stuff you didn't know. Start reading until it gets too tricky. For experts, read backwards until you know everything. If you have an annoying problem, it is pretty easy to skim the relevant chapter to find your problem and read the fix.
If it's too difficult for you, perhaps you can get a friend. If, like me, you think you are an expert, you can hide your shame for skipping the "easy stuff," install the fix and pretend you knew all along. By organizing this way, Steve has created something that while you are reading it, seems aimed directly at your skill level.
With most tips books, you are mostly thinking, "This is too complicated," or "I already knew most of this stuff." But I guarantee that no matter your skill level, you'll find your sweet-spot and thoroughly love the book.
I was able to correct a bug in my Open File dialog that had messed up the icons on the left. For ages, I had been typing in the path to files because the locations under the icons were invalid. But right there on Page 56 was the solution to my ailment - hidden TweakUI, which I had installed ages ago but not revisited to fix my problem.
