The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide by Mark Minasi. I read this book cover-to-cover back in the 90s - when I was not even a teenager - and it had a massive impact on my life. I was already a bookworm at the time so it wasn’t a big deal to read this massive book as a kid, but the stuff that I learnt in it was so fascinating that I couldn’t keep it down. I originally got my parents to buy it so that I could mess around with and learn more about our old home PC, but thank to the book, not only did I build my first PC successfully (a Pentium III 450 with an nVidia Riva TNT), I gained the skills to fix most computers - my favorite hobby back then was to go around my friends and families homes and fix their PCs.
This one time I got rid of some viruses at my mum’s office, and my mum’s colleagues were so impressed that started calling me over to their homes to fix and optimize their PCs. Everyone used to call me a “whizkid” and a “genius”, but a lot of that praise was thanks to that book. Needless to say, I have a successful career in IT today, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that my career pathway - and my primary hobby till date (messing around with computers) was greatly influenced by the book that I once read as a kid.
The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide by Mark Minasi. I read this book cover-to-cover back in the 90s - when I was not even a teenager - and it had a massive impact on my life. I was already a bookworm at the time so it wasn’t a big deal to read this massive book as a kid, but the stuff that I learnt in it was so fascinating that I couldn’t keep it down. I originally got my parents to buy it so that I could mess around with and learn more about our old home PC, but thank to the book, not only did I build my first PC successfully (a Pentium III 450 with an nVidia Riva TNT), I gained the skills to fix most computers - my favorite hobby back then was to go around my friends and families homes and fix their PCs.
This one time I got rid of some viruses at my mum’s office, and my mum’s colleagues were so impressed that started calling me over to their homes to fix and optimize their PCs. Everyone used to call me a “whizkid” and a “genius”, but a lot of that praise was thanks to that book. Needless to say, I have a successful career in IT today, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that my career pathway - and my primary hobby till date (messing around with computers) was greatly influenced by the book that I once read as a kid.