Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide

User review
WOW
If you want to hack the XP registry this is the book. If you need to know where items in the registry are located, this is the book. Reccomend.

User review
Text-Book.
This book is one of several books I have looked at concerning the Windows Registry. It reads just like a textbook. It covers various topics that may increase one's understanding of the registry and come with detail programs one can use to change it. It is a decent book- I would even say it's EXCELLENT. However, It is a little to much for me. For a more leisurely read, I would recommend Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks by David A. Karp. It gives a brief history and explanation of the registry and comes with programs and tricks also.

User review
Lots of fluff, not much meat
The first half of the this book (200 pages) explains what the registry is and how to change the settings. The next 150 pages give some detail, but misses some very important registery keys. No where in this book does it explain how to turn off autoplay on the CD-ROM.

User review
Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide
The Registry guide is chock full of tweaks for fine tuning the registry. If you are advanced in computers this should be the book for you. I advise you though to backup anything you do with your registry because you can really mess things up. The book points this out and gives you a better understanding of the inner workings of your computer's registry. I do think some of the concepts could have been more elaborated on but it is clearer than some books I've encountered.


User review
Not For Beginners, Mandatory for Systems Administers
Not for the beginner or the faint of heart. The registry is that thing down at the bottom of the operating system that controls what the Windows XP operating system does.

Thankfully the first part of the book starts out with pretty basic information like what's in the registry. Then it discusses its structure, and begins to define some of those cryptic things like HKEY_USERS, and a bunch of other HKEY's. At the very least, the information in Part I is of interest and probably something that any fairly advanced user should know.

Part II gets into Registry in Management, this has chapters on Using Registry-Based Policy, Windows Security, Troubleshooting and so on.

Part III, Registry in Deployment is on using the registry to set up individual systems in a broad based deployment.

All in all, this is the most complete, best thought out book on the registry available. This is the second edition of the book on Windows XP, but it follows on previous books where Mr. Honeycutt described the registry on previous operating systems such as Windows 2000. His development of both understanding and the ability to describe that understanding is based on writing several previous books.