Anyone who has looked at the smartphone market recently knows there are a variety of phones to choose from. As I'm sure you will have noticed many of these phones use the same hardware but what provides the features, in addition to the hardware, are the operating systems. So which one to buy; especially if it is for business use.

As the name suggests this book was written mainly for the mobile office worker who wants to get the most out of their Android phone, while you may not want an Android phone it's useful to see what the features are available. I found it useful to help determine the features I want in my smartphone, independent of operating system (OS) or smartphone vendor.

You're will be glad to learn you don't need to be a programmer or a techie to understand this book. Android is still evolving, both from an operating system (OS) view point and phone
vendor's modifications, This book was written mainly with the Google Nexus One running Android 2.1 and 2.2 in mind, although other phones and earlier versions of Android are mentioned, as I write this Android 2.3 has just been introduced.

As you read through the book it's peppered with the tips, notes and web links which provide further information, I found this very useful and a great help to get started. The information, in chapter 1, on activation was very interesting, this requires a Google account, and some Android phones require a Gmail account as well, worth knowing these sorts of things before you decide on the phone.

As I read through the book there was lots of useful information e.g. international calls, VPN, email, Microsoft exchange etc. However what was disappointing was that this information was not summarised in an appendix, perhaps in table form, to help choose smartphone features etc. The book is about 300 pages, I realised this about page 100 and started to make my own notes.

Chapter 8 looks at "Android in a Microsoft World," this is a useful chapter since many enterprises use Microsoft products. However knowing you can download Microsoft documents is cold comfort if you can't do anything with them. Fortunately, you can view and even edit Microsoft Office documents with the help of some third-party tools. The most important thing to ask yourself, as you evaluate apps, is just how much you need them to do. Do you just need to view Office files, or do you need the ability to edit them?

This book is well structured and written in an easy to understand format, it's not technical. I highly recommend this book if you want to understand and get the best out of your Android smartphone.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010-Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010

This book is squarely aimed at the "techie developer," you will need to know ASP.NET 2.0 at least, the good news is that if you are familiar with SharePoint 2007 you may be able to skim some chapters although I doubt you will want to once you get into it.

I rather like the "Reading Key" at the start of each chapter which essentially says if you are familiar with SharePoint 2007 then certain bits may be of interest but the rest you can skim.
As you go through this book it becomes clear that you are only scratching the surface of the subject, if you have more than a passing interest, in SharePoint development, you will need to get your hands dirty and look into things much more deeply.

The book is well written by Sahil Malik, although very technical it is written in an engaging manner which helps with the depth of the information it contains. Sahil says that he will focus on what you, as a productive SharePoint developer needs to know, and I feel he achieves this.

Chapter 1 was quite a refreshing introduction, I was a bit unsure with the request to "Please Read!" as a chapter heading, but found it very useful. Better to see this all in one place at the beginning of the book than buried throughout the book and making it difficult to extract the information. At least you should be able to get your environment up and working before you start to get into SharePoint 2010. As a basic introduction it provides you with an approach to constructing your "sandbox" environment.

Sahil goes on to talk about how data is organised and the many SharePoint features available out of the box, this provides the basics you need. Chapter 3 is a different matter, this provides the solution framework and you will come back to the concepts in this chapter time and time again. Although the suggestion is that you read it five times, you will probably go mad if you do but you will find yourself dipping in and out of it.

The final chapters of the book cover, Enterprise Content Management, Business Connectivity Services, Workflow and Business Intelligence which were the icing on the cake for me. The Security chapter is required for completeness but I feel you will need to search out more detailed information regarding this topic.

This is probably not the only SharePoint book you will need but it certainly provides a very good starting point for developers, compared with similar books it provides a deeper understanding of some of the technical issues.

I've just purchased Office 2010, and sitting in front of my laptop I can see, out of the corner of my eye, a copy of "Using Microsoft Office 97" gathering dust on my bookshelf. Well, although I have not used Office 97 for a number of years I did think that it would be useful to update my knowledge about the Office suite of programs, hence my purchase of "Beginning Microsoft Office 2010 by Guy Hart-Davis."

This is quite a weighty tome, some 753 pages, but don't let this discourage you, as you will find out its very good value for money. The book covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, Guy Hart-Davis has designed it to help the beginner and intermediate user get up to speed quickly and immediately become productive with these applications. I find his approach focused, providing detailed advice on everyday tasks as well as the more complex tasks.

If you are reading this for personnel pleasure or work there are many items you will find useful.

If you know anything about Office the temptation is to skip Chapter 1, which is an introduction to the five main Office programs, but that might be a mistake, I found a few things I had not picked up by just using Office, in any case if you have used Office before it will not take long to read.

Given that you cannot look at a blog or article these days without the "Cloud" being mentioned Chapter 2 provided a very good overview of how to start using the cloud via Microsoft's SkyDrive, worth a look with the 25GB free space.

I found Chapter 3 provided a very comprehensive understanding of the common tools across the Office suite, very useful if you are using an old version of Office or only use one or two of the applications, this shows you how they integrate and how you might make best use of this integration.

Chapter 7 explains how to format your documents, in particular applying styles, anyone who has used Microsoft Word knows that "styles" are very powerful, but at the same time you can get into a lot of trouble if you do not understand them. In fact you usually end up using the default, which given the versatility of this feature is a waste. You need to invest time in understanding how they work and chapter 7 goes into all the detail you need.

Creating Excel charts is covered in chapter 14 and is fairly basic, but essential for the beginner, not so clear that the intermediate user would find it helpful, although I found it is set out very well. The Excel chapters do not mention pivot tables which might have been useful, but I guess you cannot cover everything.

Chapter's 17 and 18 are quite good at combining the mechanics of PowerPoint with the need to create clear, concise and compelling slides; if these are the only chapters you read in this section it will be worthwhile. I liked chapter 19 because it told you how to set up your PC for a presentation, how often have you plugged in your laptop, to a supplied projector, only to find that there was some incompatibility with the projector. Well this chapter should help sort it out, a very comprehensive chapter about presentation, very useful stuff.

Chapter 21 is part of the Outlook section and explains how to import contacts; it would have been more useful to have had information about importing messages from other email applications.

I guess what I like about the book is that all the cool features you get with Office 2010 are explained very fully and that enables you to make the best of the applications; the tips that pepper the text are very useful as well. However as mentioned earlier you need to invest time in understanding the books content in order to gain the most from it.

There are a few general points worth consideration. On page xxxii the author says "stout though this book may feel in your hand, it covers only a fraction of what you can do with office programs." It then suggests you look at Guy Hart-Davis's website [...] which is a companion to the books Beginning Microsoft Office 2010 and Beginning Microsoft Word 2010. Here you'll find tips, resources, and a form for asking questions you'd like to see covered on this site.

It would have useful to be able to download the examples in the book from a website so that you could practice as you went along.

The other important thing is that you can download the eBook of "Beginning Microsoft Office 2010," which is a steal at $10 and very useful as a reference text.

You could use "Beginning Microsoft Office 2010" as a reference book, the book is structure to allow you to start from the beginning and work through it, or dip in and out of it as you require. I read from cover to cover, this might take you a little longer than you anticipate because if you are anything like me you will want to try out what you're learning, especially the tips.

Whatever you decide I can definitely recommend this book very highly, have fun and enjoy the experience.