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Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition Review by Jerry Saperstein
Not as much depth as expected
This is a good, solid book on Windows XP, but it is disappointing in that it is not as deep as I would have hoped. O' Reilly seems to have wanted to distinguish this annoyances book from their excellent XP Hacks book.
Perhaps it is the "for Geeks" in the title that increased my expectations. But it seems the author strained a bit to fill pages - sixty of them, for example, on VB Scripting and the Command Line. The short section on "Choosing the Right Filesystem", discussing whether to use FAT, FAT32 or NTFS seems superfluous in a book aimed at "Geeks". As the book itself says "[i]f Windows XP is the only operating system . . . you should be using NTDS - no question." Even though the book dates from 2004, any "Geek" would have known that. In fact, author Karp is actually wrong: there are certain applications that require you to use FAT32, but those would be used only by real geeks.
Overall, it's worth the money as so many O'Reilly books are, and a solid addiiton to any geek's library.
Jerry