While a decent primer for podcasting, it is definitely not for anyone with any knowledge of podcasting. Strictly a beginners guide.

I'm an O'Reilly fan and must own a few dozen O'Reilly books, so please take my prejudice into account. Still I think it is a rational bias considering the quality and reliability of O'Reilly products. Enough preliminaries, let's get into the review.

This book definitely lives up to it's subtitle - "Tips & Tools for Finding, Listening To and Creating Podcasts" - 100%. It's also one of that rare breed, a "Pocket Guide", that actually fits in your pocket. It's a great introduction for someone seeking a brief overview of the whole field. Jack Harrington, one of the trio of authors, was known to me prior to reading the book from an excellent series of podcasts he narrated on podcasting technology.

I'm more interested in podcast production than in the podcast "consumption" side of things. This book, as the subtitle advertises, covers both downloading and listening to podcasts as well as production. The consumption side comprises about 50% of the book including both discussion of podcatchers (podcasting listener clients, e.g. iTunes) and brief synopses of over 30 podcasts, none of which I listen to, nor am I likely to listen to despite the briefs. Most of us have our own pod tastes so the reviews just weren't important to me. So in a sense the 50% podcast consumption coverage is a 'weakness' from my point of view.

The podcast production side is it's strength with discussion of hardware, software and producer workflow / content issues. By far the strongest link in this threesome is the software discussion with the hardware discussion being the weakest link. In fact the hardware discussion, "what microphones should I be looking at?", is really just barely touched on and readers are referred elsewhere. Okay, I understand this is a complex topic but even some technical basics would have been nice.

There is excellent brief coverage of the software side of podcast production that is up to date and targets the core issues wannabe podcast producers are interested in. They discuss Windows, Mac and Linux environments so the coverage is "OS agnostic".The discussion of how to organise and plan your podcast is great too.

The book focuses on audio podcasting only, no video here. It gives you enough to get going with a simple audio track podcast without the devilish details generated by multi-person roundtable interviews, outside interviews, skype calls etc. Still a great intro to the basics.