Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource by Michael Miller

This book is an amazingly comprehensive reference for the beginning to intermediate Google user. I would recommend this book for educators and librarians interested in Google and anyone else trying to get a grasp on Web 2.0 services.

Advanced users may also find a new tool or service and a few advanced hacks.

The real disadvantage to buying books about Google is that it is a company that changes their products very rapidly, so portions of this book are already stale.

Googlepedia is a reference text for all Google products and services.

Google is a moving target. Traditional software companies update their software in major packaged releases. Google can just push out fixes and upgrades as soon as they make them, so it's inevitable that parts of this book are out of date before the book is even published.

Googlepedia author Michael Miller has attempted to minimize some of this by maintaining a blog at googlepedia.blogspot.com, but as of this writing, the blog itself has gone stale and was last updated in December of 2007.

Googlepedia is well organized with margin notes that give tips and warnings. The interior is black and white, so the margin notes are printed with a gray background that still remains legible. It would have been nice to see color screen captures, but it isn't necessary for comprehension.

You could read the book from beginning to end, but most people would find it more helpful to skim and only read the entire chapter for topics that interest them.

Audience

While the audience says it is targeted towards the intermediate to advanced user, beginners will really benefit from it, too. The language is not full of technical jargon, and the topics are covered from scratch.

For instance, the chapter on Blogger starts by reviewing what a blog is, and then offering advice on the pros and cons of maintaining a blog. The chapter then goes into the specific tools in Blogger and how to use them.

Because this book was designed as a comprehensive guide to Google products and services, there is not a lot of room to go into detail. There are entire books written on single Google products like Blogger, YouTube, and AdSense. However, if you only had money to buy one book about Google, Googlepedia would be a great choice.

I received a copy of the book from the publisher for the purposes of this review.