Technology Books and Home Users

In the past few months I have started making the transition from reading on my computer monitor to physical books, simply because my eyes can not handle the strain of focusing on the monitor for hours. After reading a good deal of computer related books I have started to realize an annoying pattern, authors and book publishers are trying to appeal to the wrong demographic. It does not matter how technical a subject may be, the author still attempts to write it from a home user perspective.

While reading Server Technologies chapter in The Complete Reference: Networking the author goes on to discuss how servers are no different than workstations! The author suggests that you should buy a workstation and use it as a server because the differences come down to servers simply lacking audio and video cards, have higher prices, and lack the free peripherals! Here are some fun quotes from the chapter

“The question then remains, what you do get when you purchase a server for more money than you would spend on a workstation with the same processor and a comparable amount of memory and disk space?”

“Although servers generally do not come equipped with high-end video and audio adapters, there is usually no reason why you can’t add them later and use the computer for tasks more traditionally associated with client workstations.”

This is not about me not liking some book and deciding that I should rant about it. Overlap of home and enterprise technologies exists in majority of books that are not directly published by the software or hardware manufacturers. The reader does not buy a reference book on networking to read about networking topologies, routing protocols, and how to convert their home PC into a server! Instead the reader wants an insight into an industry, platform, hardware, or software that is not readily available to them. In other words, when buying a 500+ page book on firewalls, I am not buying it to read about Zone Alarm. In fact, Zone Alarm and Cisco PIX should not be mentioned in the same chapter.

I am now becoming one of those people that hangs around Barnes & Noble for hours, reading chapters from random books before making a purchase.