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From Barnes & Noble - bn.com

The Barnes & Noble Review
Imagine yourself a "zero." Or if you prefer, a "one." Tiny as you've just become, you're perfectly sized to go inside your computer, zip from one device to the next, skitter across a network, and ultimately discover how all these technologies work.

Too fantastic a voyage for you? Get How Computers Work instead. Ron White takes you under the hood of virtually every contemporary computer technology, showing you how everything works -- with a major assist from hundreds of full-color illustrations. This Sixth Edition's not merely updated, and not merely bigger: It also includes a CD-ROM containing a "up-close virtual reality tour" of the innards of your PC. (Watch out for that fan!)

How Computers Work illuminates everything related to your PC: processors and memory; disks (including compression and defragging); software and programming languages; DVD players; joysticks, mice, and touchpads; the Web and email; streaming media, LANs, wireless, Palms, color printing, scanning and OCR, speech recognition, uninterruptible power supplies...we could go on. The explanations are exceptionally relevant, accurate, brief, and readable. This is a book that ought to be in every library. Starting with yours. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey-based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

From Barnes & Noble - Bargain Catalog

From the boot-up process to data storage to how the Internet works, this long-standing bestseller on computers takes the reader through the neural pathways and vital organs of a personal computer. Follow PC/Computing senior editor and computer expert Ron White as he guides you through pages and pages of eye-catching full-color illustrations that make even the most complex subjects easy to understand. Makes clear such cutting-edge technologies as the Internet, multimedia sound and video, Pentium processors, digital cameras, color printing processes, and more.

Booknews

A book/CD-ROM tour through the workings of the personal computer. Sections on microchips, data storage, input/output devices, multimedia, networks, and printers contain overviews of how and why technological processes work. The color diagrams explaining details are clearer and more interesting than the companion CD-ROM's interactive displays, video interviews, and computing tips. This second edition contains updated material on multimedia. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Stephanie Zvirin

Ever wonder what the guts of those familiar PCs look like? If you're curious but fear computerese might get in the way, this book's the answer. Although not entirely without technical terminology, it's an accessible, informative introduction that spreads everything out for logical inspection. Carefully sequenced captioned diagrams do most of the work. Scattered throughout the book, they conduct readers on a visual tour of PC terrain that begins with the bootstrap--the permanent coding that launches PC operations--and ends with explanations of how different kinds of printers handle the information PCs send. In between comes information about such things as RAM, a mouse, CD-ROM, and tape backup. To make everything even clearer, White introduces the explanatory diagrams with a few concise, lucid paragraphs of text. Readers will come away knowing not only what everything looks like but also what it does.

New York Times Book Review

For many computer users, the notion of probing beneath the covers of these expensive machines and noodling with their innards is not appealing. Even if someone works up the nerve to look around in there or dares to make some useful upgrades, poking around motherboards and expansion cards will probably feel like a perilous walk in the dark. But if knowledge is the light of the world, then the contents of the 292-page book "How Computers Work," which comes with a complementary CD-ROM, will certainly illuminate much about the inner workings of today's home and business computers-without requiring the user to look under the hood. Unlike instruction manuals that often come with computers and are either so laden with jargon or so simplified that they read like maps without street names, this large, well-illustrated book strikes a good balance between the needs of the beginner and those of the more experienced user. Its author, Ron White, a senior editor at PC Computing magazine and founder of one of the first PC online user groups, is an old hand at these kinds of books. A patient teacher, he writes in a clear and well-informed voice that says, "You, too, can understand this stuff." In the opening of chapter six, "How Windows Uses Memory," for example, White writes, "Memory is the staging area for the processor, the place where the processor receives the instructions and data it needs to do its job." And yes, this book, while conveying some information that is universal to practically all computers, is more or less aimed at explaining the ins and outs of Windows-based PC's with Intel chips, commonly known as Wintel computers. There is no mention, for example, of Macintosh computers. Windows 95 and Windows NT figure prominently in the book's explanations of software, and Intel's Pentium Pro chip gets its own chapter. To its credit, the book covers some of the most common computer peripherals, like printers, scanners, joysticks and even digital cameras. And "How Computers Work" delves into the unseen world of what is actually going on inside, say, a transistor, the building blocks of computer chips-the kind of exploration that is a must for any computer book worth a tree's life and limbs. Interested in the interplay of electrons on P-type silicon? White tries to make it seem oh so simple-most of the time. The generous use of large, colorful illustrations practically turns "How Computers Work" into a picture book. And the CD-ROM that comes tucked in a pocket inside the back cover is an imaginative interactive guide into the hardware of multimedia computers. Through sound and animation, the CD-ROM offers a 3-D vision, rather than the book's X-ray vision, of how computers work-for example, what happens when a floppy disk is formatted. In the face of this book-and-CD-ROM combination, the computer might have a tough time holding on to the mystery of its inner workings.

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions
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Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

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