[LinuxBIOS] book review : BIOS - the practice manual

Quux pawn2be.wild at yahoo.de
Wed Aug 29 21:15:19 CEST 2007


book review:

BIOS
das Praxisbuch   (praxis book)   ,    5. ed.

Studienausgabe with CDROM (unabridged)
by Alle Metzlar (c) 2005, ISBN 9783772 370342, €20, 405 pages, Franzis
publishers "professional series"



There are only a handful books out there (in German language) which
carry "BIOS" in its title, a recent one is Metzlar's book.

it had a sticker on it "know how für lau" (know how cost free), which
for me in case was true since it was on bargain sale free of charge with
only €4 shipping cost by terrashop.
(folks, I have no affiliation with any commercial firms involved).

Now, the book is not too bad and compiles many useful information
(master passwords for legacy bios, ISR, post code,CMOS table values asf.).
However, it is mainly suited for intermediate and beginner level I would
assume. It deals with legacy BIOS only. LinuxBIOS developers will
probably not find too much new info in it - but then it does not claim
to do so. Probably Darmawan's book is more of a source here.

There is some writing about a couple of freeware / shareware windows
tools for hardware tweaking and such. Some BIOS functions are detailed
with some source code (DMI, pnp functions).

The author has done a good job in bringing entry level people to a
certain level of understanding what the legacy BIOS is about and how to
start tinkering with it. Yet a true professional developer will probably
not so much
leaf through it if he/she encounters tricky challenges during BIOS
development.

Book publishers seem to like the term "The standard work on " (anything)
which they label this book with. Readers who know true standard works
(e.g. on human evolution, a chess opening) might find this a bit too
"salespeople-ish" in this case. Maybe Darmawan at some point will be the
real guy who wrote the book on "BIOS" ? There is space for that in the
german book market, observers could presume.                       --Q





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