This book is an excellent introduction to Windows Vista in many ways. If you want to learn about Vista because you've gotten it on your new computer it's great. It has a summary of all the new features and capabilities that Vista brings. In fact, in my experience there's a point to recommend Vista that he doesn't mention, i.e. It's a lot more stable than XP. Vista simply doesn't crash. =

But should you upgrade an older system to Vista. Although this book talks a fair amount about upgrading to Vista, the author says on his web site that buying a machine with Vista pre-installed is a lot simpler. That too backs up my own experience. Vista is a lot more tricky about the hardware configuration than older systems. You need a lot more memory - 512 MB is minimum and a gigabyte is recommended. I'd really recommend 2 GB. Your video card now requires 64 MB, with 256 MB recommended. (Do you remember when PC's themselves didn't have that much memory?) And you need a 7200 RPM disk drive.

With the price of PC's these days, it's probably cheaper to buy a new machine with Vista installed than try to upgrade, especially if you have to buy memory, video card and a new hard drive.