A nutshell type book on OpenELEC
First of all I must mention that this post is practically not Raspberry Pi related. Nevertheless the book reviewed here has instructions on installing OpenELEC on the Raspy and that is all.
Some time ago I made a review on another of PACKT Publishing's books. It was about RaspBMC, and I complained in it about why there was no additional information for competitive systems like OpenELEC for example. So here it is - a separate book dedicated solely to it - Instant OpenELEC Starter by Mikkel Viager.
Some time ago I made a review on another of PACKT Publishing's books. It was about RaspBMC, and I complained in it about why there was no additional information for competitive systems like OpenELEC for example. So here it is - a separate book dedicated solely to it - Instant OpenELEC Starter by Mikkel Viager.
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| The quickest OpenELEC intro |
The book comes as part of a series entitled INSTANT (Short | Fast | Focused). This mantra sets the writing in a pretty tight frame of size (maximum number of pages) and allowed topics. That leaves almost no ground for criticizing the book's contents. Despite that I'll make a few points that came to my mind.
All those small books that are a hundred and something pages or less (in this case they are just fifty), always tend to make me feel like: meh, for such a volume they can only gather a handful of hyped tutorials and form them as chapters. In most of the cases this impression proved wrong, thankfully. Here for example, they spared the chapters, which makes it a bit more narrative and fluent to read.
The target audience are the complete beginners, and the most vivid example of this fact are the instructions for installing third party add-ons. In short it is explained that one has to download the add-on on their PC and then install it on the media center through an USB disk. Actually I've seen some forum discussions (and almost-tutorials) about how to install a browser on the media center OS and browse internet with it. This is still an advanced matter, and doesn't seem to be a priority feature request among the XBMC-rooted media center solutions. These intricacies are not mentioned, which represents a great plus of the book - it has mostly functional approach and is technical at minimum.
The quick and just-do-it-and-dive style of this shorty can't afford to tackle whit the really interesting subjects as what OpenELEC really is, and why/how is it better/different than/from RaspBMC; or what it gives us more than the originating XBMC implementation.
Moreover this not even a book about Raspberry Pi. It has been mentioned in the part with the installation instructions for it and that's it.
This book will find its audience, although it (the audience) will be kind of tight. That is the large number of beginner or just regular users, who are tied to the mass-accepted plug-and-play model. Linux and Mac people are left outside. That is not an issue because most of them will hardly ever need this book, since they meet bigger challenges in their daily digital experience.
Another positive side is that the links from the section for further reading tend to be really useful - related to the project's most important activities and the people working in its realm.
Whatever the deficiencies I described, this book in general justifies its purpose. It was meant to be short, quick and to the point, and it has done it well. Now I'm only left with one question - is this type of books needed at all? As far as I know (as a developer) the common user-base the answer seem to be yes. Since the Internet (although the OpenELEC's own wiki pages are pretty good and straightforward) can be very distracting and confusing at times, most of the people out there need just this. So this book is for a numerous group of everyday users. Too bad I'm not quite part of it. :)
Leaving out the books, I 'm having this intention for some time, to make a comparative post about the different media center solutions for Raspberry Pi. Thinking through it one realizes that plain (versus style) comparison won't be quite accurate because two general cases exist:
All those small books that are a hundred and something pages or less (in this case they are just fifty), always tend to make me feel like: meh, for such a volume they can only gather a handful of hyped tutorials and form them as chapters. In most of the cases this impression proved wrong, thankfully. Here for example, they spared the chapters, which makes it a bit more narrative and fluent to read.
The target audience are the complete beginners, and the most vivid example of this fact are the instructions for installing third party add-ons. In short it is explained that one has to download the add-on on their PC and then install it on the media center through an USB disk. Actually I've seen some forum discussions (and almost-tutorials) about how to install a browser on the media center OS and browse internet with it. This is still an advanced matter, and doesn't seem to be a priority feature request among the XBMC-rooted media center solutions. These intricacies are not mentioned, which represents a great plus of the book - it has mostly functional approach and is technical at minimum.
Moreover this not even a book about Raspberry Pi. It has been mentioned in the part with the installation instructions for it and that's it.
This book will find its audience, although it (the audience) will be kind of tight. That is the large number of beginner or just regular users, who are tied to the mass-accepted plug-and-play model. Linux and Mac people are left outside. That is not an issue because most of them will hardly ever need this book, since they meet bigger challenges in their daily digital experience.
Another positive side is that the links from the section for further reading tend to be really useful - related to the project's most important activities and the people working in its realm.
Whatever the deficiencies I described, this book in general justifies its purpose. It was meant to be short, quick and to the point, and it has done it well. Now I'm only left with one question - is this type of books needed at all? As far as I know (as a developer) the common user-base the answer seem to be yes. Since the Internet (although the OpenELEC's own wiki pages are pretty good and straightforward) can be very distracting and confusing at times, most of the people out there need just this. So this book is for a numerous group of everyday users. Too bad I'm not quite part of it. :)
- RaspBMC and OpenELEC should be compared to each other and to each other only - they're both XBMC implementations, and should be taken as such in the given context.
- Once the best XBMC clone for the Pi is determined it must be thrown in the next battle - against the clones of other solutions, e.g. OpenELEC vs. RasPlex.
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