Introducing Windows 10 Field Guide

I know it’s been a long wait, but the first, incomplete version of Windows 10 Field Guide is now available. Given that we just slightly missed the July 29 launch—cough—we decided to target the November Update (version 1511) release for this initial version of the book. And then we’ll update going forward as apps and the OS are updated.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As it stands now, the book is still somewhat incomplete, and you’ll see several chapters—Groove Music being a good example—are pretty short on content in this release. So between now and the end of the year, I hope to “complete” those chapters by getting more content into the book manuscript. Plus adding new content for more advanced topics such as Hyper-V and Storage Spaces.

Some of the existing content in the book will need to be updated as well. Much of it was originally written for the RTM version of Windows 10, so we’ll be doing a sweep to make sure everything is up to date with 1511. That hasn’t been completed yet, but I’ve added a number of tidbits throughout the book to address changes in this latest OS release.

Also, because of our move to Leanpub—a long, painful process that I’m still wrestling with somewhat—some of the formatting isn’t correct or at least optimal in the book right now, especially the images. I can probably save a lot of page count by reducing the size of some images or, even better, ensuring that every single image is sized correctly, and manually. That will happen, but it will be a slow, manual process. But updating formatting errors is a priority, and I can quickly fix any issues that we (or readers) find.

As I noted in my previous update, we’ve had to raise the price of the book: Where Windows 8.1 Field Guide was $2, Windows 10 Field Guide is $14.99, though we still support variable pricing down to $9.99. So our Utopian vision never panned out. But we feel that this new book offers a much better value than its predecessor, thanks in part to the inclusion of Martin McClean’s amazing Windows 10 Field Guide Companion poster, which you can have printed in massive sizes if required, and his in-book quick reference sheets for key new Windows 10 features. And we’re also selling a $19.99 version of the book (variable priced as low as $14.99) that includes printable posters for both Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4 as a bonus for fans.

Anyway, sorry for the long wait. And hopefully just pushing this initial, incomplete version out the door will help trigger a more regular release cadence as we move beyond 1511. There’s much to do, but as you can see, a lot of work has already gone into this.

Windows 10 Field Guide is available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats exclusively on Leanpub.

More soon.

Paul