Information about the authors: Jesse Torres has experience in the private, corporate and governmental sectors and has authored 'Windows Admin Scripting' and 'Windows Admin Scripting 2nd Edition', as well. Peter Sideris also has extensive computer knowledge and is currently a Systems Engineer for General Technology Group, Inc., specializing in security, disaster recovery and planning. The introduction is well written giving a general idea of the purpose for which the book was written and instructions on how to use the book.

Each chapter has numerous subheadings related to the main topic, making it easy to find something that pertains to your particular disaster, mishap or blunder, without having to read the everything, a lot of which might not be what you are looking for. That said, there is no reason you shouldn't want to read about something that might pertain to your computer usage in the future, in fact it might be a good idea to go back and reread whole chapters occasionally, so you know what to look for to avoid something similar happening to you.

The body of the book is interspersed with topic related horror stories illustrating a particular topic, such as this (excerpted from the Hardware Disasters and Mishaps chapter): "We work with someone who spent over $2,000 on a powerful computer system so that they could be really productive with their work. Then they got cheap and decided to buy a very inexpensive wireless network card. (This would be like buying the top-of-the-line Mercedes and then putting cheap gas in it!) Soon they discovered that the cheap card shorted out the motherboard, rendering the computer useless. The moral of this story: It's okay to look for a good deal but do your homework and don't buy junk."

As with all O'Reilly computer books I have used, as well as reviewed, I found this title to be useful and that I keep going back to, as something comes up. I said earlier that it might be a good idea to go back and reread whole chapters occasionally, and that is something I frequently do with this book and others like it, as I am a believer in the idea that there is no such thing as too much knowledge of computers and that too little knowledge is no good at all.