randomosity

Sure enough O’Reilly have intro­duced a new ver­sion of their iPad: The Miss­ing Manual series, aptly named iPad2: The Miss­ing Manual. Like all Miss­ing Manual series, con­tent is at the over­view level attempt­ing to cover the com­plete range of ques­tions a new user might have of a par­tic­u­lar tech­no­logy. The book has all the good stuff when it comes to troubleshoot­ing though and this is a par­tic­u­larly good miss­ing manual.

The bottom-line is that it answers those nig­gling ques­tions that new users would have and con­tin­ues to serve as a use­ful ref­er­ence source as a user gains familiarity.

iPad2: The Miss­ing Manual is a lively read and the approach­ab­il­ity of the volume is enhanced by the use of lots of full col­our illus­tra­tions, screen shots and dia­grams. The chapters are organ­ised very logic­ally and by this I mean that the titles focus on spe­cific actions that you would want to actu­ally *do* with your iPad. I sus­pect that most users will in fact look to the first two chapters to actu­ally setup and make sure that their iPad is work­ing as it should before mix­ing and match­ing with the rest. It’s easy to find the action sought and quickly loc­ate the info desired. Gen­er­ally indi­vidual sub­top­ics are kept to a single page which makes things very easy to access.

One of the biggest cri­ti­cisms of the book is its very heavy US-centric bias. Prices are all in US dol­lars, and when it comes to tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions options only US pro­viders are dealt with — and done so in great detail. Great book for Amer­ic­ans, but if you live out­side the US, a lot of the ref­er­ences seem to be rendered use­less — unne­ces­sar­ily — and frankly for new users to the iPad con­fus­ingly so. I can’t see try­ing to provide tele­com pro­vider inform­a­tion for every loc­ale, but won­der if the book wouldn’t be bet­ter served to simply say, local options may vary and to provide ref­er­ences rather than just choose one large mar­ket and render the oth­ers untouched. I star­ted to raise this as a minor quibble, but it rather grew on me. Why are prices even given in a prin­ted book these days. It’s use­ful and suf­fi­cient to provide a URL to the product site, but the inclu­sion of prices really localal­ises a book and from my per­spect­ive unne­ces­sar­ily and dis­use­fully so. Moreover, the prices change and why lock the book in time. I think it import­ant to espe­cially warn users that all fea­tures aren’t avail­able in all regions.

All in all though I do find this a very use­ful manual and would recom­mend it to new users of the iPad. It provides very extens­ive cov­er­age of all the basics and steps into the breach giv­ing excel­lent troubleshoot­ing and dir­ec­tion for where one might turn to find addi­tional information.