Books

In the early 1960s, my parents bought my youngest brother a box of LEGO bricks. That was the beginning of our family’s appreciation for LEGO, which continues to this day (I recently gave my LEGO robot mini-toy to my favorite 9-year-old, but I still use my LEGO gym bag and have a LEGO soccer player minifig on my desk). In our local shopping mall, the Apple store used to be right next to the LEGO store, and I have spent a lot more time with LEGO toys than "Apples". My son and daughter still have thousands of bricks and minifigs and accessories in storage here and there. So when I got the chance to review a book called The Cult of LEGO, I was eager to get started. Was my enthusiasm for the project rewarded? Read on and find out.

Many people enjoy chit-chatting on Twitter these days—even people who swore they could never fit everything they wanted to say into 140 characters. Businesses are taking notice of this and getting their own Twitter accounts, both to keep current customers and to attract new ones. The concept of "social media marketing" is becoming more popular all the time. The author of #tweetsmart - 25 Twitter Projects to Help You Build Your Community, J.S. McDougall, saw an opportunity to help businesses use Twitter to good advantage. Was he right about this, or did his "tweet" miss the mark?

Windows Movie Maker was first introduced as part of a service pack for Windows XP, and quickly proved to be very popular. It made creating videos very easy, so much so that many people didn’t even need to read the directions. (Like me—I created a couple of silly parody videos with the Windows XP version.) Windows Movie Maker was also included in Windows Vista, but with the advent of Windows 7, Microsoft removed it and made it part of the Windows Live Essentials package. To me, the latest version seemed just as easy to use, while I was creating my third silly video without reading the directions. Was I missing out on something by doing it that way? I was very interested to see what Getting StartED with Windows Live Movie Maker could tell me. (Yes, they capitalize ED in the title, because it is a "friends of ED" book.)

I have always been a late adopter of new Microsoft software, under the "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" principle. I only just started using Windows 7 extensively last year, and based on the few screenshots and incomplete information I’ve seen on Windows 8, in magazines and on web sites, I hadn’t been particularly interested in hopping on the bandwagon any earlier than I had before. But I’m always willing to change my mind, and I definitely wanted to see if Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start would show me anything to make this new operating system more appealing. Would this book do the trick?

We reviewed the original edition of Windows 7 Inside Out back in 2010 and we considered it a great book for people who want to go in depth with their understanding of the Windows 7 operating system. The authors together with Microsoft Press, just launched a Deluxe Edition of the book. So I wondered: what makes this new edition worthy of being called Deluxe? I was very interested to find out.

I had never heard of the Head First series of books before I got this one to review, so I was really surprised by the way these books approach their subjects. I’ve read a lot of technical books in my lifetime, but never one like this!

I think it’s safe to say that nearly everyone who’s had to use email on the job has used Microsoft Outlook. I was one of many people who learned just enough about it to get by, and never thought of it as anything more than an email program that could also print calendars. My boss knew less about Microsoft Outlook than I did, so I always printed out the departmental calendars for her. So, imagine my surprise when I saw the title of this book! Using Microsoft Outlook for time management and organization? This, I had to see. Could it be used that way even by people with only basic skills? I was very eager to find out.