Windows XP Embedded Step by Step by James Beau Cseri

Excellent Introduction
Review written by: Jeffrey L. Cooper From North Central Massachusetts, USA
This book is truly step-by-step. It may be too basic for experienced developers (consider "Windows XP Embedded Advanced") but it gives a clear-cut sequence to getting your first Windows XP Embedded (a.k.a. XPe) image up and running. Combining the material in this book with the online documentation at MSDN and the various XPe online forums will pretty much ensure success. You will hit a stumbling block here or there but you will get through it.

The book is still applicable and accurate. The preferred practice nowadays is to import your .pmq file into Component Designer instead of Target Designer but that's described at MSDN as well.

Kerry Ottoson
Review written by: Kerry O. Ottoson From USA
I was very disappointed with the contents of this book. The information presented here can all be found in the readme files on the Embedded XP CD, in the development tool's help files, or on the microsoft website http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded.

If you are looking for details about some of the 10,000 components in the XP Embedded component database, this book does not have anything.

If you want all the installation and tool operation information in one place, this book is for you. If you want more in depth information about what the XP embedded components do, save your money.

Godd for beginner but not enough to do stuff
Review written by: kevin From Reno, NV United States
This book falls somewhere between "The most USELESS book..." and a book that is not detailed enough to really use. For beginners yes, its probably a good start, although XPe is not for beginners, it for serious programmers that need to crowbar XP into small things. I ordered this book and "Windows XP Advanced" by Sean D. Liming, and found that "Windows XP Advanced" was all that is needed.

A patently unfair review
While there are shortcomings in any book, the review below is manifestly unfair and wildly off the mark. To suggest that the book is "useless" while at the same time failing to back up these statements with any detail at all, is unacceptable. The author has a great deal of experience teaching the official Microsoft curriculum for Windows XP Embedded, and selected exercises that teach the most useful fundamentals. Does it cover every aspect of XPE? In 240 pages? Of course not. This wasn't the purpose of the book. The purpose of the book was to give newcomers to XPE a thorough introduction to key concepts of the OS and teach them, step by step, how to perform common implementations.

Want to build a headless system? That's Exercise 10. Want to implement Enhanced Write Filter and boot from CD ROM? That's Exercises 12 and 13. Create a custom component? Exercise 15.

To suggest that the book "doesn't include anything that can be usefull [sic] when developing with/for Windows XPe" (especially to someone who has never tried to boot XPE from CD ROM) is ludicrous - check the XPE newsgroups and you will see that many of the questions posed by newbies can be answered by completing the exercises.

Sometimes books get a bad review and that's fine, but unsubstantiated flames cannot go unanswered.

Annabooks / RTC Books

The most USELESS book
Review written by: Ellias From Arizona
I'm an embedded software engineer and my current project involves developing product for XPe based platform.

It's my first project involving Windows XPe and to speed up development I've bought this "book" and in 5 minutes
found that it's the most USELESS purchase I've ever made.

This "book" doesn't include anything that can be usefull when
developing with/for Windows XPe.

Evaluation copy of Windows XPe from Microsoft ( cost ~ $3.00 )contains much, much more then this so-called shameless parody on
computer book.

Shame on both publisher and author.

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