Getting Started with NetBooks

Timing makes this book unique. Mobile-connected culture has been a relatively exclusive club up to this point. Because it has almost entirely been based on smartphones -- expensive, quirky, n- standard, walled garden gadgets -- its growth has been stulified by fragmentation on every level. In contrast, netbooks offer a populist solution: inexpensive, dependable, and benefiting from a huge head start in software applications, peripheral devices, and web-based services that were built for desktop or laptop computers, but can be easily reused by netbook owners. Even in a weak economy, netbooks have taken off in Asia and India, and show every indication of following suit in North America. In this book, I set out to make you a better, savvier consumer of a technology that can transform your day-to-day life in some pretty important ways. But I don't assume that you already know a lot about this kind of computing or, for that matter, any kind of computing. I was guided by the idea that if you want to get started, I want to help you do it. So here are all of the steps, with nothing left out.