Review: Take Control of your iPhone by Ted Landau

I have been reading the great, free weekly Macintosh newsletter TidBITS since I was in college.  If you use a Mac and don’t subscribe, you are missing out and should do so.  The publishers of TidBITS, Adam and Tonya Engst, also publish the “Take Control” series of electronic books.  These books are written by professional and talented writers and are the same as any book you would find in any bookstore, except that these books are electronic.  This means that when you want to buy the book, you don’t have to drive to the store or wait for Amazon to send it to you; you just pay the (always inexpensive) price and immediately download the PDF file.  These e-books are also unique because the authors can actually update them after they are published; each book has a big “Check for Updates” button on the cover. 

One of the latest Take Control books to be released is the Second Edition of Take Control of Your iPhone.  This $15.00 book was written by Ted Landau, who has been writing about Macintosh and other technology issues since the 1980s.  He is most well known for the MacFixIt site that he founded in 1996, which quickly became the premier site for Mac troubleshooting.  CNET now runs that site.

This is probably not the book to buy if you are just looking for basic information on how to use the iPhone and its built-in applications.  (If you want to learn the basics, I recommend you check out David Pogue‘s excellent book iPhone: The Missing Manual.)  Although Ted Landau does cover some of the basics in this book, there is very little discussion of many of the built-in apps on the iPhone, such as Mail and Phone.  Instead, Ted appears to have two goals with this book.  First, the book focuses on the iPhone features that can be a little harder to understand, especially if one wants to use advanced features.  For example, the book includes great, in-depth discussions of syncing, mastering the keyboard, Safari, Maps and Location Services, and the various radios in the iPhone (WiFi, Edge, 3G and Bluetooth).

Second, this book discusses just about everything that might go wrong with your iPhone and walks you through how to fix it.  This is perhaps the best part of the book, and the author’s history as an expert troubleshooter who ran MacFixIt really shines through here.  Even though my iPhone usually works just fine, after reading this book I now feel well prepared in case a minor issue or even a disaster does strike — and should anything bad happen, the first thing I will do is turn to this book and remind myself what Ted recommends for fixing the issue.

For those of you who use (or plan to use) an iPhone in a law firm that runs Microsoft Exchange, Appendix A to this book gives you an overview of how to do so and links to all of the information you need to set this up from Microsoft and Apple.  It is nice to have links to all of this information in a single place.

Even though some of the troubleshooting tips covered are necessarily a bit complicated, the author’s writing style makes this 183 page book easy to read.  And while most of the iPhone is simple enough to be figured out by a child, Ted Landau did a great job of picking areas to cover that are not so obvious.  As a result, I recommend this book to all iPhone users, regardless of your level of expertise.  As is typical for Take Control books, you can even download a free sample version of the book that includes the Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts.  (The link for the sample is at the bottom of the page where you can download the book.)  So if you are on the fence about whether you should get this book, take a look at the free sample.

To go to the page where you can download this book, click here.  The book only costs $15.00, so for about the cost of a lunch or a few cups of coffee, you can have a much better understanding of how the iPhone works and how you can make it work better for you … especially if anything appears to be going wrong.