This is a strangely written book. It is praiseworthy in that, apart from the mandatory nuts and bolts description of the Amiga and it's hardware/software, it also attempts to look at the larger picture, the technological and cultural era that the Amiga initiated and whose traces are still with us today.
In the attempt to grab both ends of the subject, the general and the detailed, and squeeze them into one coherent result, the result is not always that coherent. I was tempted to abandon the book at one point where I was reading the equivalent of a User Guide for Deluxe Paint, complete with references to select menu items to load images or to select resolution and color depth for a new image. There are cases where we are presented with very detailed descriptions of software implementations, i.e. bitplanes or specific color selections (with verbatim color tables!). No more than 2-3 pages after one such detailed section, IN THE SAME CHAPTER, we read about Commodore sales strategy across North America and Europe. If publication material editing and arrangement is an art, it was not mastered here.
Nevertheless, having not abandoned the book, I discovered much that I did not know, and for the first time, I established proper closure for the Amiga as a phenomenon that came, ran its course and was technologically obsoleted but conceptually far reaching. For all of us who loved the Amiga, and were sad to see it go, this book is a worthy tribute - an objective look at the design wonders, and the limitations, that made the Amiga the special experience that it was.
