Remember that no general purpose book can substitute for the instruction manual of a specific product. Each product works differently, and the general purpose books cannot tell you exactly how to setup and install, for example, a Sound Blaster AWE32 card. Instead, they provide useful guidelines to keep in mind when you try to decide which multimedia products to buy. Both books focus exclusively on the IBM-type PC, and on Microsoft Windows in particular. Dummies, being a newer edition, includes occasional mentions of Windows 95, but most of the information in both books applies equally to Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
Dummies is organized as a reference book.
Only deranged book reviewers should read all the chapters, in order. By comparison, Idiot's Guide is organized more as an introductory text, especially the first few chapters, which provide an overview of multimedia. Idiot's Guide comes with a CD-ROM that contains some shareware games, a few shareware utilities, and some pictures, sound clips, and video clips. If you buy Idiot's Guide , remember that if you decide to keep any of the shareware programs, you must pay a registration fee to that program's author. As mentioned earlier, this reviewer prefers Dummies .