Comments about oreilly Motorola Xoom: The Missing Manual:

Ah, the joy of discovering a new Tablet. When the Motorola Xoom appeared in my local Costco warehouse, I immediately purchased one to learn about it.

Alas, the box contained only a small leaflet with too few details to understand the power of the Xoom, which essentially came from the Android Honeycomb operating "platform".

That evening, I found my solution: O'Reilly Publishing had recognized the need for one more of "the missing manual series, with the obvious title of "Motorola Xoom".

Author Preston Gralla shows his computing credentials in this his 40th book. Many bear the respected O'Reilly imprint.

The book is written for a newbie to tablets and other "tapping" devices. If you have already mastered an Android phone, you can jump right into the advanced material. But for "late or non-adopters" of smart-phone gear, the essential first chapter brings one up to date easily and quickly, as the fundamentals of the Android platform are basically cross version and cross device.

Much of the Xoom / Android's power comes from the bundled Apps, some of which may be familiar to power users of the Google collections. The book covers these apps one-by-one, with no expectation one has previously had any experience with them.

Much of the book is "cross device", applicable to most of the proliferation of Tablets. That is except the defunct HP attempt, the lame Research in Motion version, and, of course, not for the popular Apple iPad line.

I found most of my questions answered for the Acer Iconia tablet also. This is because the Xoom device was the "reference implementation" of the Honeycomb release.

The book is also available in a variety of e-Book formats. I did not use these in my basic learning because I wanted to have the full function of the device available when reading a book about the Xoom. So I loaded the e-Book pdf format onto my PC, and had the benefit of "dual processing" on two processors.

What might be good for the next version would be to improve the size and readability of the icons in the book. They mimic the size and "white-on-black" style of the tablet's icons. For easy recognition, the more conventional iconic representation in printed material of "black-on-white" is recommended.

Because of the Google planned acquisition of Motorola, this book has an extended shelf life. Certainly as new versions of Android become available, it would be useful to have the "base" which is well delivered in this book.