"How to Build a Perfect PC" is a very good overview, but PC's and components are forever changing - so to be entirely pertinent, this is the type of book that requires frequent updates. If you're building your own, you'll find that with all the accompanying instructions and manuals, you go into sensory overload trying to determine the proper way to do your build-out and then make everything work. The most difficult aspect of building a new computer is your wiring and cable management. Make a wrong selection/choice and the system undoubtedly won't work, as expected. This book helps to make you think you can do it, but later on you may find yourself treading dangerous waters. I'm at that point now with my system, and I'm going to have to do a lot of serious reading in the component manuals before I complete my final wiring hook-ups and venture to plug it in.

I am happy with this book so far although I have not had time to put it to the test. I have been monkeying with computers since 1985. I wanted to get current in a hurry. The book looks well put together and easy to understand with good pics. I like the way the information is presented. It looks like it was written with great care and honesty. Not a bunch of BS. You need the buyers guide to go with it. It's cheap, more up to date and a great reference. The writers admit that the book needs a supplement and the buyers guide does that. It is probably not possible to put everything you need in one book.

After reading this book I was able to build my first system. Great book easy to understand.

I am a fan of Make but was dissapointed in the book because it is so out of date. There is a long lead time between completion of a manuscript and publication of a book. The parts lists, price information, and even some instructions are out of date and inconsistent. The overall ideas in the book are good, but maybe this is a project that should be published as an online guide where updates are dynamic. As a novice builder, the first thing I did was flip back to the budget PC parts list, log-on to NewEgg, and discover the parts are not available. I was dissapointed.

This book has gotten some pretty good reviews, which is one reason I chose it over other, similar titles. So I hate to be the voice of dissent, but here's how I feel about this book.

I think this book is extremely useful in theory. What I mean by that is you can sit back and read the book without actually doing the projects and learn quite a bit about PC components. For example, I now know that Antec is a really good brand to choose for the case. I saw the layout of a motherboard and have a better understanding of what the different sections of it are for. And maybe most importantly, I learned about the little things to look for when choosing the individual components, especially to make sure that they are all compatible with each other and, of course, with the motherboard.

However, when I finally started reading one of the chapters on actually *building* a system, that's when it fell apart for me. I read the gaming PC chapter, because what I'd like is a gaming PC. Well, it didn't take long before I was thoroughly confused. I felt like a lot of the steps were given in broad strokes and weren't detailed enough for a novice like myself.

Now, I know what you might be saying: you can't just read these sections "theoretically" like you can the first few chapters. You need to sit down and actually put the pieces together yourself. Well, that's fine and all, if someone gave me a bunch of free components to use. But I have no desire to spend $1000+ when I don't even understand the instructions I'm reading in the book in the first place. Example:

"Position the free-floating retention bracket over the plastic nub on one side of the black plastic retention module base."

Uh...what? And no, I'm not even taking that out of context. The instructions were just difficult to follow. And yes, like I said, it might be easier if you had the components in your hands, but this isn't like picking up some cheap items at the grocery store to perform a high school science experiment just for fun. This is serious and expensive stuff.

Something else that didn't give me too much hope was the fact that after inserting the motherboard into the case and putting it all together, the authors discovered that the back-panel I/O template had some metal tabs that actually blocked the ethernet ports on the motherboard. First off, if *they* make this mistake, I can certainly imagine myself doing much worse. Second, they don't even tell us how to fix it. They simply say that they would have "started over" -- which is absolutely no help at all, since it isn't at all clear how you would prevent this from happening a second time (none of the other ports were misaligned, so it can't simply be a matter of trying it again and hoping the tabs don't block the ethernet ports the second time around).

I also browsed the other sections and found another interesting dilemma they got themselves into. In the budget PC chapter, they chose to use a CPU cooler that ended up not fitting properly against the motherboard, and only after a lot of work and "minor surgery" did it finally fit. In other words, a hardware compatibility issue -- exactly what the authors had been warning us to avoid.

A final example of what I would call the "impracticality" of this book is this: in the chapter on building a mainstream PC, we are given this advice before installing the motherboard:

"Check the motherboard documentation to determine if any configuration jumpers need to be set."

Again...what? The authors don't explain what this means or how to do it, and they don't even mention this step in the chapter on building a gaming PC. I suppose it's possible that the particular motherboard they used in that chapter does need any jumpers set, but I doubt it. I think they just left it out of that chapter. I shudder to think what else could have been left out, and having to face that problem all alone when I'm in the middle of putting all my components together.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not listing these things just to show how incompetent the authors are. They seem to really know a lot about what they're doing. My point is, if they can make these types of mistakes, then certainly anyone new to building a PC can (and probably will). Furthermore, as I said in the case of the metal tabs, they don't even say how to fix the problem.

If anything, this book has shown me that building a PC is just as difficult as I imagined it might be, and that it isn't always a clean and easy process. It's a really exciting thought to put all these pieces together yourself, but I don't know if I'd start by doing it with new, top-of-the-line components. One thing for sure I will do is take apart my parents' current computer as soon as they get a replacement, and I might even have this book on hand just to see if I understand it better then.

Finally, the binding of this book is terrible. One section has already fully bent back, looking like at any moment the pages will start coming out. Even worse, the entire spine of the book has torn away from the back cover. If this happens in the front, then the entire cover will come off the book! And I am very careful with my books, so this isn't from rough treatment. This book has moved from my desk to my bed, a matter of two feet, and after three days it's already falling apart.

So all in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading about building a PC, but I'm not so sure everyone will find it all that easy to follow when it actually comes time to build it. Furthermore, since the authors use (necessarily, I understand) very specific components in their projects, it seems possible that when you go to build your own PC using different components, some entirely different issue might pop up that the authors don't discuss since they aren't using the same equipment as you. This, of course, cannot be avoided, but to me it just shows that building a PC still might be a somewhat intimidating process.

This book has gotten some pretty good reviews, which is one reason I chose it over other, similar titles. So I hate to be the voice of dissent, but here's how I feel about this book.

I think this book is extremely useful in theory. What I mean by that is you can sit back and read the book without actually doing the projects and learn quite a bit about PC components. For example, I now know that Antec is a really good brand to choose for the case. I saw the layout of a motherboard and have a better understanding of what the different sections of it are for. And maybe most importantly, I learned about the little things to look for when choosing the individual components, especially to make sure that they are all compatible with each other and, of course, with the motherboard.

However, when I finally started reading one of the chapters on actually *building* a system, that's when it fell apart for me. I read the gaming PC chapter, because what I'd like is a gaming PC. Well, it didn't take long before I was thoroughly confused. I felt like a lot of the steps were given in broad strokes and weren't detailed enough for a novice like myself.

Now, I know what you might be saying: you can't just read these sections "theoretically" like you can the first few chapters. You need to sit down and actually put the pieces together yourself. Well, that's fine and all, if someone gave me a bunch of free components to use. But I have no desire to spend $1000+ when I don't even understand the instructions I'm reading in the book in the first place. Example:

"Position the free-floating retention bracket over the plastic nub on one side of the black plastic retention module base."

Uh...what? And no, I'm not even taking that out of context. The instructions were just difficult to follow. And yes, like I said, it might be easier if you had the components in your hands, but this isn't like picking up some cheap items at the grocery store to perform a high school science experiment just for fun. This is serious and expensive stuff.

Something else that didn't give me too much hope was the fact that after inserting the motherboard into the case and putting it all together, the authors discovered that the back-panel I/O template had some metal tabs that actually blocked the ethernet ports on the motherboard. First off, if *they* make this mistake, I can certainly imagine myself doing much worse. Second, they don't even tell us how to fix it. They simply say that they would have "started over" -- which is absolutely no help at all, since it isn't at all clear how you would prevent this from happening a second time (none of the other ports were misaligned, so it can't simply be a matter of trying it again and hoping the tabs don't block the ethernet ports the second time around).

I also browsed the other sections and found another interesting dilemma they got themselves into. In the budget PC chapter, they chose to use a CPU cooler that ended up not fitting properly against the motherboard, and only after a lot of work and "minor surgery" did it finally fit. In other words, a hardware compatibility issue -- exactly what the authors had been warning us to avoid.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not listing these things just to show how incompetent the authors are. They seem to really know a lot about what they're doing. My point is, if they can make these types of mistakes, then certainly anyone new to building a PC can (and probably will). Furthermore, as I said in the case of the metal tabs, they don't even say how to fix the problem.

If anything, this book has shown me that building a PC is just as difficult as I imagined it might be, and that it isn't always a clean and easy process. It's a really exciting thought to put all these pieces together yourself, but I don't know if I'd start by doing it with new, top-of-the-line components. One thing for sure I will do is take apart my parents' current computer as soon as they get a replacement, and I might even have this book on hand just to see if I understand it better then.

Finally, the binding of this book is terrible. One section has already fully bent back, looking like at any moment the pages will start coming out. Even worse, the entire spine of the book has torn away from the back cover. If this happens in the front, then the entire cover will come off the book! And I am very careful with my books, so this isn't from rough treatment. This book has moved from my desk to my bed, a matter of two feet, and after three days it's already falling apart.

So all in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading about building a PC, but I'm not so sure everyone will find it all that easy to follow when it actually comes time to build it. Furthermore, since the authors use (necessarily, I understand) very specific components in their projects, it seems possible that when you go to build your own PC using different components, some entirely different issue might pop up that the authors don't discuss since they aren't using the same equipment as you. This, of course, cannot be avoided, but to me it just shows that building a PC still might be a somewhat intimidating process.

Greg's review: I think this is a great book for beginners. It would have bean a lot harder to build our first computer without it but if we had already built some computers it would have bean a lot less helpful. It gives you a good amount of information like the price ranges that our best to buy in, what things you should look for in components you are thinking about buying, what different components do, and how to put them all together. It doesn't tell you exactly what to buy and hoe to put it together either it assumes that you will modify there examples to fit your needs better and tell you how. The only bad things about it are that it doesn't tell you how to install an operating system, and some of what it says is a bit old. Unfortunately it would be impossible to make a book that tells you how to make computers which isn't a bit old because computers are getting better so fast.

Dad's review: I think this is a great book for beginners. I would never have had the confidence to go out and buy the parts and build a PC without this kind of help, but I'm happy to say my 10 year old son and I read the book and successfully built a pretty decent computer.

A good thing about this book is that it gives you an explicit list of parts to buy, tailored to the kind of PC you want (budget, mainstream, gaming, media centre etc.). A better thing about this book is that while giving you this list, it talks about the features of motherboards, disk drives, chips, etc. that are important to look for. This means that even though we couldn't find the exact parts they listed (inevitably, because computer hardware evolves so quickly), we knew enough about what we were looking for that we could find closely similar parts and make good choices of alternatives.

One thing I think this book could add is a brief discussion of installing an operating system, since without an OS, even if you have done everything else correctly, you still just have a fancy paperweight not a working computer. We installed Ubuntu linux. It was free, easy to download, installed and ran perfectly with no special knowledge on our part in under half an hour.

For the previous poster who complained the book was out of date, I think he had the first edition (2004) not the second (2006).

It's soooo outdated and nothing about sound cards and/or video cards for gamers. Yes it was only published (available to the public) in 2004 which wa sonly 3 years ago however, in computers especially build your own, that was ions ago. The book gives you the basics as well as some advanced material in order for you to do it yourself. It's a good book however if your into gaming machines its not listed in it. This is a good start book to give you some basics of he inside of the computer and some terminology.

Do you want to build a PC for personal or business use? If you do, then this book is for you. Authors Barbara Fritchman Thompson and Robert Bruce Thompson, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that is your guide to the world of building PCs.

Thompson and Thompson, begin by focusing on things you need to know, things you need to have, and things you need to do before you start to buy components and build your new PC. Then, the authors tell you everything you need to know about how to choose and buy the components you need to build your new PC. Next, they show you how to build a general-purpose PC that is a jack of all trades and a master of... well, quite a few, actually. The authors also focus on building a reliable, high performance SOHO server, appropriate for anything from an inexpensive server for a home office to a serious server for a small-business network. They continue by showing you how to build a gaming PC on a reasonable budget. Then, the authors show you how to build a PC that provides TiVo-like DVR functions, without the monthly subscription or the DRM features common to commercial PVR units. Next, they show you how to build a full-featured PC that is small enough and quiet enough to fit in almost anywhere. Finally, the authors show you how to build a fast, reliable PC on a minimum budget.

The goal of this most excellent book is to show you how to select the best components and assemble them into a working PC that matches your own requirements and budget. Perhaps more importantly, this book provides the advice and ideas that you need to make the net PC you build the perfect PC for your needs.

I just noticed that the current edition is a revision of the one I bought from Amazon! Having said that, I'd be surprised if the quality and wisdom changed materially, and here is what I mean.

Using Thompson's book, I've built with both of my children the Home Theater PC and the Gaming PC. Both work like a champ. I'd add that much like the way the Thompson's structure each chapter, determine what you need, making a list, constructing the CPU, and what the outcome was: was our experience as well. Sometimes, the available parts just aren't. Sometimes there are driver issues and conflicts that you don't expect and it's not as though the Thompson's can know everything before the book was printed.

Some one whined a bit about the website in another review. I'd counter that with the affirmation of those who are in forum answer questions that are placed on the bottom shelf for novice builders like my family, as well as answer some truly arcane questions for advanced builders and hardware developers! That the website has "dated material" regarding hardware might be a no-brainer, but asking questions in the forum will quickly provide anyone with updates regarding anything related to hardware, drivers, and known conflicts between components.

In the build of the HT PC, we started out with an ASUS board that was (I think) recommended. But, the Plextor DVD wasn't recognized in the install. My daughter and I searched far and wide for a solution. One of the many responses to our post in the forum came in an answer from Robert Thompson, who provided the options for us regarding solutions.

The book possesses the same kind wisdom and availability to any builder from Thompson. He passes along some advice about what you can get away with in a build regarding tools-I won't disclose that secret- and just some "watch-out's" that will keep your build from becoming accidentally expensive, e.g., trying to insert the processor with the wrong orientation or incorrect application of the heat transfer paste to the processor. I'm likely to buy this new edition for the next build.

This is a great book. It got me excited as hell about building my own system. Since this was the first time I built a PC, I decided to pretty much follow very closely the bill of material listed as one of the options, but there were still some subtle differences that I had to sweat over. Many of the pictures of the motherboard, for example, were actually from a different engineering revision of the board that I bought, so the exact locations of connectors will be different from any board manufactured after mid 2007.

A note to one of the authors referred me to join a discussion website, which was a little disappointing since I believe the answer should have been known.

This book is very up to date, very insightful, it has tips and tricks that only can be learned after many years of experience, and is very well written.

I would recommend that a first time builder also buy Rosenthal's "Build Your Own PC". This book is a little more ancient, but it has interesting history about PC components, and it shows another point of view on the same subject. It also includes more info on the CMOS setup and installing the OS, which is just as important as the physical build if you want your computer for more than just a decoration.

The book is well written with excellent pictures and guidance. The short coming is the web link. The book refers to the web link for updated information on component selection. Unfortunately the vast majority of the information is dated.

I have just completed my first build, and I couldn't have done it without this book as a guide. Reading this, as well as all the installation guides from your parts, and you can't go wrong. They reference many different parts that have just come out into the market (some which I used personally). He also has a website that you can go to with Forums, which he is very good at answering posts by the way...)
My only wish is that he could help me with all the software once I finish, so that I can optimize completely and have a roaring computer! But this is on how to BUILD the computer, not run it. :) All in time I guess...

The authors deliver a wealth of information in a format that is useable. Their hardware choices and why they made them make the book worth every nickel. Also the number of different types of machines you can build using the book makes this a "must have".

With that said, and considering I had never built a PC before, my first experience was longer and more difficult because of a lack of detailed instruction on turning the new machine on and booting it up the first time[s]. The motherboard I bought as part of a "bare bones" package (case, power supply and mobo) was probably a decent unit. The booklet that came with it was extremely short (part of 4 pages), the images were fuzzy and an critical piece of information was incorrect.

Turning the machine on, it shut off as predicted by the authors. Turning it back on as they said, the machine ran for about 10 seconds and shut off. Another reboot, the same thing. I attempted to clear the CMOS by jumping it as shown in the booklet. The next boot resulted in a "CMOS Checksum Bad". No tech support contact info in the booklet for the mobo resulted in me using another PC to access the CD that accompanied the mobo. Extremely poor resolution images that got even worse by zooming in were of little help. But there was the CMOS jumping procedure using an image identifying the "1" pin being the exact opposite of the way the booklet showed.

This book had basically no information on problems booting other than the point in each model build about initial powering up and why it would shut off. Buying another brand of mobo, the package arrived last night with an extensive manual with numerous clear illustrations plus very detailed sections of information on what each section does and how to set it up. I won't mention any initials here but if you think of buying a PC Chips mobo, stop thinking about it. They're junk and you do not get a refund even though their tech information disputes itself leaving one to wonder which was right.

This book provides a reader the opportunity to virtually look over the shoulder of an experienced (yet patient) computer builder, who takes the time to explain not only the mechanical steps involved, but also the background decisions and knowledge, that is, why a certain component was chosen over alternatives and why one step should be done before another. The writing style of the authors makes this book flow very well, and although people may be tempted to use it as a cookbook, reading only the "recipe" that matches the system they want to design, it is very beneficial (yet not necessary) to read the book straight through, perhaps lightly skimming the sections that are less relevant.

Even if someone never wants to build a computer, it can be very helpful to understand, for example, comparisons between different processors, hard drives, memory, and peripherals. The material in this book offers enough depth to understand the options offered with an off-the-shelf computer. It also makes the process of building a computer not merely a mechanical one.

The thorough explanations and photos in this book extend the instructions found in component user manuals, which are often difficult to understand. For example, this book shows clearly how to remove the plastic socket protector with the Core 2 Duo processor, which is somewhat tricky, but far less so with this book at one's side.

Unlike many other "build a PC" articles and books, the Thompsons' book focuses on price/performance ratios and affordability; for example, the budget PC here can be built for around $350, and even the highest-end machine isn't as expensive as those in other books. The designs here are flexible, and each one has a list of alternative suggested components, so price-conscious builders have even more options to consider (highly valuable during the price wars, for example, between AMD and Intel in the processor market).

Given the advantage in price of a "hand-made" system versus a "factory-built" one, this book can pay for itself quickly. The machine that I just built cost roughly $900; the most comparable Dell is $1229. In my experience, building my own systems saves 20-30% against the prices of mass-market vendors, even when using better components than theirs. I have no doubt as to the difference in quality, and building a machine is far more educational and enjoyable than just pulling a mass-market system out of a cardboard box.

Excellent primer for the first time builder, if he/she has a basic understanding of computer components. Authors cover building good, solid systems for almost every need a user might have. Would recommend highly to the first time builder.

I am learning a lot from this book. It is very concise and easy to read. I am very pleased with my purchase.

Until a more current edition appears, this book is a must for first time computer builders, in my opinion. It is a tad dated, but the process, procedure with pictures are a tremendous help for a newbe! A good how to do it book with pictures and a gop of web references and sources for info and components!

Until a more current edition appears, this book is a must for first time computer builders, in my opinion. It is a tad dated, but the process, procedure with pictures are a tremendous help for a newbe! A good how to do it book with pictures and a gop of web references and sources for info and components!

I Love the approach taken here. Gives a strong direction in a broad array of products and circumstances. A lot of savvy information for the casual as well as advanced builders.

Excellent book overall. One slight deficiency, it doesn't provide a complete evaluation of MS Vista.

Free shipping took 14 days.

This is one of the best books I have read on building a Personal Computer. It is detailed enough and provides alternative sources of components and suppliers.

Life is full of compromises and so are our computers. Every PC is a balance of qualities such as price, performance, reliability, noise level, size and expandability. With commercially built PCs, the manufacturer determines what factors are most important, and the number one factor is generally cost. Building the Perfect PC 2nd Edition tells you how to build your own PC and make the choices that reflect YOUR priorities and not those of the manufacturer's accounting department.

The book begins with a chapter of fundamental knowledge. It explains the advantages of building vs. buying a PC (cost is only one), discusses how to strike the balance of PC characteristics that are right for you when choosing the components to build your PC and gets up close with a typical motherboard. It also includes a guide to troubleshooting many of the most common problems encountered when building a PC. The next chapter addresses each component that goes into a PC on an individual basis, from major items such as processors and video cards to seemingly trivial items such as power supplies and optical drives. As savvy PC builders know, the power supply is an important part of a reliable PC. You'll learn how and where to buy the individual parts. Names are named, of both manufacturers and resellers.

The remainder of Building the Perfect PC documents the process of building several different kinds of computers, each with a different budget and different goals, including mainstream PC, SOHO server, gaming PC, media center PC, small form-factor PC and budget PC. Each build is broken up into a functional requirements section, hardware design criteria, component considerations and documentation of the actual assembly with plenty of color photographs in extreme detail. The parts selected to build each PC are listed and just as importantly, the reasons for selecting them. Alternate choices are given as well in case the reader wants to deviate from the recipe for some reason. I found the parts of each case study that dealt with requirements and component selection to be most interesting, but first-time builders will likely be grateful for the very detailed assembly instructions and accompanying photos.

In addition to the Thompsons, who are the primary authors of the book, several other experienced computer builders provide tips and the occasional dissenting opinion throughout the book. The book is filled with useful real-world advice that might otherwise take years of building PCs to discover on your own.

Books are also subject to compromise, and this one is no exception. The authors recommend that readers read the entire book and not just the beginning chapters and the PC build that they are interested in. However, much of the assembly information such as installing motherboard standoffs is repeated in each chapter. The Thompsons had a choice between trying to provide complete instructions in each build and boring readers who followed their instructions and dutifully read the complete book. They chose thoroughness, which was probably the correct decision, but I wonder if the book might have been organized in a better manner to avoid the entire issue. I was also disappointed that the media center build didn't have more information about the software that the authors ultimately ended up using. The software installed on the assembled PC is generally up to the owner discretion, but full-featured multimedia PCs are still on the cutting edge of computer technology and there seem to be many pitfalls in installing and configuring the necessary software. Complete documentation of this particular build would definitely have added value to the book. My assumption is that deadlines prevented them from performing more research into this important topic.

Another complaint is that I found only one photo of setting jumpers on an IDE device and it was too dark to make out any details. Most of the many photos in Building the Perfect PC 2nd Edition are quite clear and all of them are in color, but given the amount of space allocated to pictures of tightening screws, I had hoped for at least one more jumper photo.

Despite a few flaws, the book is still excellent. Beginning computer builders can follow the provided plans and well documented assembly instructions and end up with a reliable, good performing PC. The authors also maintain an active Internet forum where troubleshooting and configuration advice is readily available. Intermediate builders will undoubtedly learn some useful techniques and gain greater insight into optimizing their computers without going over budget. Even experienced builders, if they haven't built a PC in the last year or longer, are likely to find that hardware has changed since the last PC they built. This book offers broad coverage of the mainstream PC component market and will bring them back up to the state of the art quickly. Overclockers may be disappointed, since running a PC out of specifications is not conducive to reliability and the Thompsons always emphasize reliability as a high priority. They can still benefit from the book, though they'll have to find out about the latest in extreme cooling technology elsewhere.

The latest in a series of how-to books from Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson, via O'Reilly, is as complete a DIY guide to building a PC as you're likely to find.

Geared towards the first time builder it removes the mystery out of custom PC building while leaving the magic of creating a working system in. Old hands at PC assembly, this writer included, can also glean a wealth of information from its pages. The authors assume nothing, with the possible exception of the reader being able to read, in their complete coverage of planning a system, selecting components, selecting vendors, purchasing the parts, assembling them into a system, configuring the system, starting the PC up and troubleshooting.

A handsomely illustrated guide to building any of six basic configurations ( Mainstream PC, SOHO Server, Media Center PC, Small Form Factor PC, Gaming PC and Budget PC), each with its individual needs and configurations, it brings forward the years of the Thompson's experience in designing and building systems.

Now one may ask "why build your own when affordable systems are available from so many suppliers?" The answer provided is that only by building your own are you in full control of the quality of the components used and configuration based on your specific needs. System manufacturers, in their quest of maximizing profits, will often install the cheapest components in their units. While it may not necessarily be true of all custom built systems, cost of a personally built PC, with superior components can actually be lower. An example is the choice of a CD-DVD burner, those supplied in retail versions, while perfectly all right for occasional burning duties, simply can't reliably burn disc after disc after disc. Another example is that one simply cannot find a commercially available PC with one's choice of operating system but, as the Thompsons point out, even purchasing a component motherboard, in most instances, enables one to bundle in an OEM version of an OS at significant savings over the retail version. The book identifies those components that have proven to be of high quality and can be expected to perform over the life of the PC.

Up to date, with coverage of the latest Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon X2 CPUs, the book avoids obsolescence by providing links to the Thompson's own websites where information will reflect the latest advances in the art.

If you've always wished you could build a system configured to your needs but were afraid to, make it a reality with Building The Perfect PC.

For those reviewers who complained that the first edition was becoming dated, the second edition is finally here! If you are considering purchasing this book, be aware of the authors' biases: the Thompsons focus on selecting high-quality components with an emphasis on system reliability and reasonable overall price, at the expense of bleeding-edge performance. Consequently, this book is not likely to entice the overclocking and benchmarking crowd, although overclockers will also benefit from being familiar with the Thompsons' hardware recommendations and the reasoning behind those recommendations. As for this book's target audience, readers whose goal is to build a home or small office PC that Just Works, this book is an invaluable and remarkably comprehensive guide.

I've been using, maintaining, troubleshooting and repairing computer systems since my first Apple II+ in 1980 - but in that quarter-century, I've never built my own machine from scratch. It was something I've always wanted to do, but never quite got up the nerve. With the myriad of potentially incompatible components on the market, how can a person possibly decipher the jargon and buzzwords to purchase only, and all of, the parts needed to build and configure a modern computer? Easier, I thought, to pay somebody else to select and assemble the parts and make it all work together.

But now Robert Bruce Thompson has put his knowledge and experience together into a "cookbook" on how to brew your own computer. In this, the 2nd edition of "Building the Perfect PC", you will find exhaustive and painstaking instruction and examples in how, and WHY, to build your own computer. How to design the machine that YOU need, not just a "generic box". RBT goes into a lot of detail as to what components he recommends, and why, and what alternatives you might choose instead.

Any technical reference should be (said my tech writing professor in 1977) clear, complete and concise. If this book has any flaw, it is that the book is not concise. Thompson repeats many of the same recommendations in each of the six "recipe" PCs he builds. But is this really a problem? In his review of the 1st Edition, "Poorly Organized, March 23, 2006", Reviewer H. Cohen writes "Instead, they put something vital to most system builds in the first build description but excluded it in others. Then they would put something essential to most builds in the second build description, that they had left out of the first." This problem has been completely addressed in the 2nd Edition.

The 2nd Edition is complete, comprehensive, almost exhaustive. He shows you with innumerable photos exactly what he's doing, and explains why. He even shows a couple of times when things went wrong, and how you can prevent his mistakes.

And while "Building the Perfect PC" is not advertised as a humor book, I would not advise that you read it while drinking hot liquids. RBT's dry wit could easily cause you to end up wearing them.

So, have I built my own PC? Not yet. But I have started shopping for parts, and I have complete confidence that within a couple of weeks, I'll be able to write a follow-up to this review using my home-brew PC.

Over the years I've come to rely on Robert Thompson's advice on building PCs. He has never led me astray and this book continues the perfect trend.

I've built two of the SOHO servers described in the book and each build was smooth and trouble free. For this kind of book, there is no higher praise than that.

His continued willingness to name names about what brands are good based on his own personal testing of them puts him head and shoulders above his competition.

This is the book you want if you know virtually nothing about computer hardware and want to make the big step to building your own. It is absolutely superlative for complete novices. The authors know their stuff to a level rarely seen, are funny and witty and not in the least condescending (a problem with many "how-to" books, I've noticed), and they attempt -- and in my opinion succeed admirably -- in making a terrifying experience so easy that we're doing it again. I've read many criticisms of this book, but I don't think any of them are relevant. Yes, you'll have to do a little of your own research on current products (obviously the computer industry does not stand still), and yes, you'll probably have to make a few minor adjustments between their recommendations and what you'll actually need to do, but this is still a book without peer, in my opinion. We used it to build our first computer last September, 2005, and it has worked beautifully and perfectly since then. I can honestly say that you will not find a better, more honest, and truer evaluation of the process and the products than this book. The language is clear, the instructions are simple to follow, and they cover a range of computers. We intend to build a server soon, and we will certainly use this book as a basis for the process. By all means, buy it!!!