I've had to call IBM product support a couple times looking for guidance as I tried to troubleshoot an obscure problem. In addition to the direct support I received, the helpful folks on the telephone directed me to two books, NRP's Inside OS/2 Warp and Sams Publishing's OS/2 Warp Unleashed. It proved to be good advice.

One caveat before I begin the review. This is a 1200+ page book. I haven't read every word on every page. I haven't looked at every file or run every demo on the included CD-ROM. That isn't the intent of a reference book, so I don't feel bad about the holes in this review. My goal is to describe the flavor of this recipe, so that you can decide whether you want to taste it yourself.

This is a multi-author book, and it shows perhaps a bit more than the editors would have liked. Styles vary from friendly, first-person chatty to somewhat dry tutorial prose. It is written assuming that the reader has at least a casual familiarity with PCs and their operating systems. There are plenty of appropriate illustrations and screen shots and the whole package is spiced up with "highlight boxes" which call attention to notes, tips, cautions, and other information that the authors felt deserved special attention. A lot of the most interesting stuff in the book appears within these boxes. A big "WARP" in the margin further highlights the information which is pertinent specifically to OS/2 3.0. All in all, the book is very clear and readable. But is it worth reading? On to the contents!

OS/2 Unleashed opens, logically enough, with a chapter on installing Warp. This chapter alone is almost worth the price of the book. It leads the reader, step by careful step, through the entire installation process, with plenty of explanations about options. I wish that I'd had this sort of information at my fingertips the first time that I installed Warp. Still, there are some pieces missing here. Most of them find coverage in the book's last chapter, "Portable Computing with OS/2." Taken together, these two chapters will go a long way towards making a Warp installation about as painless as can be.

A hard act to follow? Chapters two and three do an admirable job. Chapter two covers system configuration, setup, and tuning. It starts with a "tuning philosophy" that stresses the all-important truth that there is no one optimal setup, and that the reader will have to experiment and monitor the results in order to successfully tune a Warped PC. That said, the text provides some basic training in multitasking and threads, followed by an in-depth CONFIG.SYS tutorial. The latter is unique in my experience, as it breaks CONFIG.SYS into functional chunks (as opposed to the more common line-by-line command description). Despite three years experience fiddling with OS/2 configurations, I learned a lot going through this section of the chapter.

Chapter 3 is another of those "unique in my experience" revelations. It's titled "Reconfiguration". Wow! Every OS/2 reference book I own covers configuration and tuning to one extent or another, but I've never seen such an up-front acknowledgement of the fact that nothing ever really gets done right the first time. This chapter tells you how to spread the pieces of OS/2 Warp around or remove them altogether.

Chapters 4 through 6 explore the Workplace Shell (WPS). They start off with the basics of context menus and move quickly into how to access Warp's on-line help files, manuals, and tutorials and from there into object manipulation, using mouse or keyboard. There's a rather terse (but adequate) tutorial on the LaunchPad followed by one of the better descriptions of the Find utility that I've seen. From there the reader is led through a whole series of topics regarding the presentation of information on the Desktop and how to control it.

I had a real problem with Chapter 5, "Workplace Shell Objects", and it took me a bit of time to figure out why. The rest of the book up to this point has been very user-oriented. Chapter 5 opens with information about the inner workings of objects that is undoubtedly useful and interesting to programmers, but of little practical value to a user trying to get up to speed. This was an annoying distraction to me. Fortunately, after about 12 pages of object classes, hierarchy, dormancy, and identifiers, the emphasis shifts back to a more user-oriented viewpoint (though patches of REXX code keep popping up here and there).

Chapter 6 moves on to "Configuring the Workplace Shell." Written by the same author who gave us Chapter 5, it comes as no surprise that the first few pages appear to assume that the reader is a programmer. This isn't as jarring here, however, as the process being described is the influence of CONFIG.SYS on the WPS. As CONFIG.SYS "programming" needs only a simple text editor, it's an appropriate skill for any OS/2 user. OS2.INI and OS2SYS.INI are a different story, and this chapter does a great job of explaining why. It also gives appropriate stress to the need to protect and archive these critical files, as well as how to restore them if they do become damaged.

Chapter 7 could easily be used as a cure for sleeplessness. It's about the "Command Line Interface," and it's dry reading. Useful stuff abounds, however, so it's well worth the effort to actually sit down and read this chapter rather than just using it as a reference when something goes wrong. You'd best be familiar with command line operations in general before jumping in, though.

Chapter 8 covers "REXX Programming." This chapter is, unlike Chapter 7, highly tutorial. It assumes that the reader already knows something about programming, but doesn't presuppose any specific knowledge of REXX. The features of the language are laid out at the beginning of the chapter, so you gain a basic understanding of why a knowledge of REXX is (or possibly isn't) useful to you. I'd say that a user with some experience in a structured language like Pascal or a newer BASIC will walk away from this chapter with the ability to write and use REXX programs.

The next two chapters cover "Virtual DOS Machines" and "Win-OS/2," respectively. These aren't as in-depth as I've seen in other references, but they highlight most of the common problem areas quite well.

The next five chapters of OS/2 Warp Unleashed cover "nuts and bolts" topics. You'll turn to them primarily when trying to solve specific problems with the areas that they cover: they don't make for an exciting straight-through read. Of special note in these chapters are: selecting the best video adapter for Warp, network printing, File Systems and Multimedia.

Here's one of the "Great Mysteries" of OS/2 Warp Unleashed: Chapter 16 is devoted to the "Productivity Applets" of Warp but there's NO coverage devoted to the BonusPak applications which have been received by EVERY purchaser of Warp. Why not? They have little effective documentation of their own.

Chapter 17 covers "Networking," and does it pretty well, if you're operating in IBM's LAN Server network. Starting from basic LAN terms and concepts, it jumps to plenty of real-world examples in the LAN Server environment. You learn how to set up your requester, with the book giving step-by-step, detailed instructions and explanations. It even gets to the point of telling you how to install and use the server software, which strikes me as being a bit off-subject for a book about OS/2 Warp. Oh, there's a little less than a page devoted to peer-to-peer networking. This is obviously pre-Warp Connect text (though LANtastic for OS/2 predates Warp by several months, and could have used a bit more than three sentences).

Most sane people hate having to troubleshoot problems with their operating systems. When you do have to do it, you want as much clear information as you can get. That's the purpose of Chapter 18. It starts with a section on recovery from installation problems that's quite thorough, then moves on to problem prevention and preparation for the few problems which will ultimately occur. Lot's of good stuff here, but I wouldn't throw away my ability to access on-line support for answers to the many questions which aren't covered here.

"OS/2 and the Internet" is the penultimate chapter of OS/2 Warp Unleashed. Did I say that this book didn't cover the BonusPak? This is the one major exception. The chapter provides a pretty good look at all of the applications which make up the OS/2 Warp Internet Connection. If you're reading this review, you already know about the Worldwide Web. If you've been afraid to try those other strange-sounding parts of Internet access (Gopher, FTP, Telnet, newsgroups, e-mail), this chapter can lead you by the hand.

Finally, there is, "Portable Computing with OS/2". It starts with good real-world guidelines for minimum and optimum notebook processor, speed, and memory capabilities. If your notebook is up to Warp, you'll find extra installation instructions (many of which are also useful for desktop installations), information on power management functions and an extensive section on PCMCIA support.

The rest of the book is devoted to three appendices and a 70-page index which is one of the book's nicest features. Many computer books have CD-ROMs these days; few are as well-described in the pages of those books as this one is. While much of the material on the CD-ROM is available from many other sources, it's still a good collection of shareware, freeware, and demos.

Well, that's it. And there sure is a lot of it, isn't there? Over 1200 pages, most of which contain information which will be valuable to somebody. I'm with IBM on this one, if you're going to have an intimate relationship with OS/2, then this is a book that you should buy. It's not for beginners, though. You need to bring some experience to this relationship. Intermediate to Advanced users will get the most out of OS/2 Warp Unleashed.

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