How to media-center with Raspbmc

I just read Raspberry Pi Media Center by Sam Nazarko. How should I describe it? In short - this book is too short. It feels a bit thin, a bit rushed to be finished. The info is exact, but at places not quite enough.

Media-center with Raspbmc

To be honest, I expected something different. It is just wrong on some levels and here is how it all intersects.

Generally all software starts living in the same manner: Install; Boot; Dive in. This scheme is omnipresent. There are certain specifics of course: installation media, execution space, configurations, execution process, etc. but the structure stands and Raspbmc is no exception from this common factual rule set.  Sometimes details might be tricky, but it is not a common situation where you get stuck and without any support. In that sense Raspbmc is a little dream - it is very self-sustained and even ... OK, I'll say it - self-conscious at some level. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

After the first two chapters I was kind of outraged - many facts were introduced and still somehow I didn't know anything about Raspbmc. I mean that I was doing the prescriptions automatically and the required understanding came from the experience, instead of being somehow suggested by the book. Just after I put the SD card with the newly installed image and ran Raspberry Pi, I realized how autonomous and durable this system is. It downloaded its components and tried to install itself. There was some error with mounting the partitions, so the install program suggested me to reboot the Raspy. I did and the installation went quickly and without any other hassle. Nothing in the first  chapter gave me even the slightest idea for that power. 

I think now is the time to share my expectations. The rest of the book is rundown of the functions and the abilities of Raspbms. Actually of XBMC. Yes, this is an XBMC media center system tailored for Raspberry Pi. But is it the best in this niche? We don't know. At least the book doesn't say so. It doesn't mention openelec (which boots significantly faster). This is another implementation of XBMC that has Raspberry Pi dedicated version. It doesn't mention RasPlex - a Raspberry Pi oriented installment of the Plex Media Server. May be there are even more that I haven't heard of. The book's title doesn't suggest that it is bound to a specific system. So I expected variants. I expected comparisons. May be even some benchmarks and reported experimentation. Instead there is a quick glimpse over the common functionality that is seen anyway when looking around the interface. Left alone with the media center for a day and most of the shown prescriptions will reveal themselves to any user. Raspbms is that easy. 
In fact the book is even dedicated to the wrong system, because the Raspbmc itself is only very briefly mentioned in the second chapter (when the plugin for managing its settings is presented) and in the fifth chapter (when setting up the MySQL database for library mode). Of course dropping to the raw console of the underlying operating system is not related to any media center functions, but it might be sometimes necessary for managing networking or some other configurations on a bit lower level. For instance I tried to switch from wired connection to WiFi in the Raspbmc settings but without success. When switched network interfaces and restarted the network manually in the console, it went fine.

It would also be nice to see in this book a bit of "outside of the box" action, like how  Raspbmc can be set up for being able to read PDFs or eBooks in general, or (the feature I missed the most) how a web-browsing can be made available through setting up Firefox, Opera, etc. I know how to do it because I've read some forums, but it have to be here.

The book seems to be aimed at complete beginners, which by definition doesn't imply any expertise. Despite that the author's expertise is clearly evident throughout the book. And that is to a point where he says too little where he thinks the details are obvious. As an example you can see the section Setting up the Library mode on a second system at the end of the fifth chapter - tiny and ambiguous info. 

May be the most useful thing in the book are the three appendices with well collected references to hardware, database and operating system commands.

In conclusion I can only say that the common Raspberry Pi user is by default technically literate. And this have to be taken in consideration even in a book for media centers.