Helpful But Repititious and a Bit Disorganized

This book does a pretty good job at clearing away some of the mystery surrounding home computer security. For the uninitiated, it defines viruses, spyware, adware, spam, phishing, etc. and does a pretty good job of helping you to understand how these threats differ from each other. The book is less successful in differentiating the symptoms that help indicate which type of infection you might have. I think the author should have included a "symptoms matrix" which showed, in one chart, which symptoms apply to which threat and which threats might exhibit overlapping symptoms. Let's face it, many readers of this book bought it because they are having some type of malware problem and they need help in diagnosing it and then fixing it. Understanding what may have caused the problem is an important step, but it's only a step.

The book puts too much reliance on virus checkers and spyware to resolve your problems. Even if these tools prevent 99% of all threats, it only takes one threat to bring your system to its knees. I don't think the book does enough to help you fix that type of problem.

I also felt that the book may be a little irresponsible in encouraging you to wipe your system clean (reformat your hard disk and start over) if all else fails. It's a little bit like a book about warfare that spends a lot of time on dropping a nuclear bomb but didn't explain very well all of the other less drastic measures that should have been tried first.

Another issue with the book is that Parts I, II, and III contain essentially the same tips organized in a different way. So, while the straightforward and humorous writing style should make a cover-to-cover read entertaining, the somewhat redundant sections actually make such a read a boring task as the book wears on. I suspect that the writer was trying to make these sections as self-contained as possible, but I don't think the book's organization was sufficiently well thought out. The author needed to make up his mind whether this book was going to be a compendium of stand-alone articles or a step-by-step tutor for beginners. It tries to be both and that gets messy as one gets deeper into the book.

In summary, if you know little or nothing about the topics covered in this book, I recommend it as a learning tool. It's also great for gearing you up to prevent problems. But don't expect it to help you much in getting rid of an infection after the fact. Unless you are into nuclear warfare.

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