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How to Do Everything with Your IPod and IPod Mini (How to Do Everything)

By: Guy Hart-Davis
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.
ISBN: 0072254521
ISBN-13: 9780072254525
Released: 01 Apr 2004
RRP: £14.99
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Customer Reviews

How to Do Everything...really well! - By: J. Kinghan, 07 Jul 2004
As a long-time PC user/sufferer I accumulated a slew of manuals & guides over the years & the bulk of them were of the O'Reilly/ Missing Manual variety. O'Reilly still seem to be at the top end of the 'most popular' search results for PC & Mac related books today. However, after years of deliberation, when I finallly jumped ship from Win98 to OSX late last year as well as welcoming a stunning flat screen iMac into our home, a cute little 40GB iPod quickly followed (I'm a marketing man's dream!) & then followed another deluge of manuals & guides. For an iPod book I stuck with the O'Reilly 'Missing Manual' out of sheer habit but a few months down the line & it's a blind purchase I now regret. I just picked up the 'How to Do Everything...' book on the iPod/ iPod-mini & it is a complete revelation. Aside from the clear page layout & supremely readable text this book is THE most informative & genuinely interesting book I have read on the iPod. Case in point: One issue poorly covered in the O'Reilly 'Missing Manual' (which considering it's importance to importing songs into iTunes is bewildering) is that of file compression. Conversely, Guy Hart-Davis has done a sterling job of explaining in some depth alll aspects of file size, compression & quality issues including a useful 'iPod capacities at widely used compression ratios' table which is one of many impressive touches seen throughout the book. This doesn't by the way mean this is exclusively a 'techie' book- it has simply struck a good balance between being welcoming enough to beginners while remaining interesting for more advanced users at the same time. Where the O'Reilly book tends to have a feeling that someone from Apple was peering over the author's shoulder when they were writing it- by contrast the 'How to Do..' book is peppered with irreverent facts like 'iPods have been used to steal software', provides workaround solutions for 'stubborn' disks that refused to be 'ripped' as well as an enlightening history lesson on P2P file-sharing & other dark arts.
Perhaps this book is NOT for people who threw away the instruction booklet contained in the iPod box, but for those who want to master the iPod & learn lot's of other related cool stuff in the process, it's a steal.

Superbly written, clear design, fairly priced & thoroughly recommended.