My Weekly Book

GPS for Dummies – Joel McNamara

I’m one of those classically impatient people that can never bear to read the manual for anything. No, I expect my gadgets to be utterly intuitive and curse them roundly when they are not. Which is why, on becoming the proud owner of a new GPS receiver, I threw this book and its instruction leaflet to one side and went striding around the local park in a bid to master its functions empirically.

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So, having used the GPS with reasonable success for a few months now, I thought it really was about time I came back to find out what I’d missed. I expected to flick through this book, learning a few useful tips here and there and then put it back on the shelf. I was quite surprised to find myself sitting down and reading it from cover to cover.

My first thought was that the title is very misleading, if understandably so. This is because it severely undersells the scope of the book. It is nothing less than a wide-ranging and expertly-written introduction to the whole topic of digital mapping and manipulation, and what the lay user can expect to use these powerful tools for. The use of a GPS receiver is quite a small drop in this fascinating ocean.

Having made this very good start my major criticism of the book, from the point of view of being British, is that large chunks of it are completely useless to me. They deal with US map datums, US map producers and US mapping software. The poor old Ordnance Survey, who are always going to be my suppliers of choice since we inhale their mapping conventions with the air we breathe over here, don’t get much of a mention. Plenty of products that I have never heard of, will never be able to buy and will therefore never use, do. In mind-dissolving detail.

If I was going out to make an informed purchase I would probably, therefore, choose something else that has been written for the UK market. And in so doing I’d miss out on a good deal of insider tips and tricks and invaluable follow-up URLs as well as an introduction to the topic which really engaged my interest and attention and taught me things about my little shiny yellow toy that I didn’t already know.

So, it’s a toss-up. If detailed explanations of specific software is what you need, and you live in approximately the right geographical area, then this is undoubtedly for you. If not, and the overview is more your cup of tea (and I chose that expression wisely) then this is still definitely worth a look, even if you will get infuriated at points at the sheer and total irrelevancy of large chunks of it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.