January 31, 2005
Quick Cure for Friend and Neighbor Annoyances
Are you the neighborhood network guru, constantly pressed into service to solve DSL, WiFi, virus and spyware problems? Do distant relatives call you late at night, asking for you to just "tune up" their computers over the phone? Have you longed for a T-shirt that says "No, I will not fix your computer"? The next time you're faced with a needy user asking you to provide a shortcut to Reading the Friendly Manual, you can direct them to one of O'Reilly's two new tomes: Internet Annoyances and Home Networking Annoyances.
The subtitles for these books are "How to Fix the Most ANNOYING Things", about Going Online and About Your Home Network, respectively. Instead of fishing through your friend's, relative's, or neighbor's computer mess to solve their problem, teach them to fish using exerpts from one of these volumes. Better yet, point them to http://www.ora.com and show them how easily they can buy the books online!
Internet Annoyances, by Preston Gralla, covers email annoyances, such as spam, as well as frequently asked questions about the email clients Outlook 2003, Outlook Express 6, Eudora 6, and Gmail. It also discusses internet connection problems, home networking basics, wireless and remote access, and web hosting adventures. A general browser section covers everything users need to know about blocking pop-up ads, preventing spyware, and efficiently surfing the web. A special AOL chapter discusses the foibles of that peculiar enviroment. Other chapters talk about instant messaging, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and even cyber citizenship. This book covers 99.999% of all annoying user questions, leaving you free to answer the .001% of actually hard queries.
Kathy Ivens' Home Networking Annoyances provides the same 99.999% completeness for networking questions, ranging from Ethernet and connector problesm to phone, power, and wireless networks. It goes into great detail on Windows user management and network troubleshooting, covering even such esoteric concepts (for home users) as mapped drives, network printing, and network design. Extensive chapters on security give step-by-step instructions for choosing and deploying firewalls, blocking viruses and spyware, and keeping out network snoops. The chapter on backups gives you an out when the worst happens and a user's computer is completely erased. Just point to that section and say "What, you didn't do this?"
Both books are written in a lively, accesible style that any non-expert reader can readily navigate. For more information on either book, including a sample chapter, visit:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/internetannoy/toc.pdf
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/homenetannoy/toc.pdf
Oh, and for that "No, I will not fix your computer" T-Shirt, go to ThinkGeek.com:
Posted by Mel Beckman at January 31, 2005 8:23 AM
