Computer Kung Fu For Beginners
- White Belt Edition

by Dave Thompson

The following is an excerpt from the introduction:

Computer Kung Fu For Beginners - White Belt Edition

How many of us have picked up a book about computers only to put it right back down again because we couldn't even understand the title? Who among us haven't seen the monster sized books on the shelf at any computer book store, books so big that it is unlikely even Arnold Schwarzenegger could pick them up? What can they possibly put in those books to make them so big? The answer is, not much. Not much at least for the average computer user. The problem is that computer book authors want to impress other computer book authors with;

a) Their seemingly endless knowledge of computer factoids and

b) How big theirs is compared to the other guy’s (books).

The truth be known we could probably take any one of those books (after a few weeks at the gym of course) and open it up to find huge tracts of data almost identical to all of the other books out there. In fact, we could probably open the same book a few hundred pages apart and find the same information presented in a slightly different way. The authors apparently do this because they know that of all the readers who start the book, very few will actually wade through to the end, and by then they would have forgotten what they read a thousand pages of geek-speak ago anyway. Why? It’s all about shelf space. The more shelf space they take, the more browsing customers will be subliminally manipulated into buying them. More than a few computer buffs have arrived home from the local book store with a brand new 2 Kilogram (Kg) copy of “Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols and Network Subnet Requirements For Cisco Transponders” without any idea of what an IP Routing Protocol is, let alone wanting to troubleshoot one. It appears there is a massive pool of computer related information sitting in an archive somewhere just ready to copy and paste (more on that later) into any new work on the subject (most likely churned out by thousands of computer-school graduates in sweatshops throughout Asia). This coupled with the fact that the authors know that most readers out there will either not understand a word of it, or vaguely understand it but have no way of actually verifying if there is any real substance to it. And what do they care? They have already sold a gazillion copies and are busy hunting for more data to put in their next 'fully updated' version. Never mind that most of these books will end up propping up wonky desks or computer monitors within a few months of release anyway, the whole point is to generate huge books, huge profits and keep the technology train rolling.

By definition, computer books tend to be either extremely simplistic, (This is Spot's new computer. See how Spot can make a line of .......) or extremely complex, (Technology used in high speed fibre optic connections at SuperJANET sites - in practice a 140Mb/s link carved up into 4x34 Mb/s "tributaries"). Your local computer courses suffer the same fate. They either teach the real basics (This is the On Switch. This makes the little green light go on  ...) or they race through the syllabus and expect the students to keep up. The problem is that computers are very complicated devices. There are many ways of doing exactly the same thing and everybody has a way they like best. What one person finds intuitive, another may find mind bogglingly complicated. At the end of the day most computer users want to be able to fire up their machine, do what they want to do and be able to shut it down again without being afraid of doing something wrong. Many of us take lessons only to find that the tutor covers what we already know, or forge ahead and we leave none-the-wiser, though normally all-the-poorer. Or if we go to the free classes, the teacher-student ratio looks more like the odds on Hayley Joel Osment knocking out Mike Tyson in the third round. The thing is, most guys want to know about computers; what makes them tick and, more importantly, how to pull them apart and put them back together again without having bits left over and a message on the screen saying “Disk Boot Error – Please Insert Boot Disk”. The aim of this book is to give the average computer user an insight into the jargon filled world of computers, put in a way that anyone can understand. You Übertechs and power-geeks out there may find this book simplistic and shallow (it's my style!) and rightly so, it is just the way I intended it to be. The opinions herein are my own and any anecdotes or stories thrown in are either 'swear-to-whatever-God-you-worship' true, told to me by people who might or might not know what they are talking about or purely fictitious, concocted by an under-active mind as fodder to fill out the pages. Just which ones are which I will leave up to your obviously fine judgment!