Customer comments on this selection.
 The Best Resource For Any New Podcaster
When I first decided to do my own podcast I spent months trying to figure out how to go about it. Finally I got this book, and I was literally podcasting within a week.
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br /Tee and Evo do a great job of breaking through the techno jargon and making the reader realize how simple the whole process really is. And beyond just the technical aspects, they guide you through the whole process of deciding what kind of podcast you should do, what format to use, how to organize your content, and how to promote your show once you have it done.
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br /They guide you through every step of the way without ever seeming condescending or boring you with unnecessary detail. This really is all the information you need to create, publish, and promote your podcast. There is just no better place to start.
 Exactly What I Was Looking for in a Podcasting Book
Podcasting is something that just about anyone who has spent a fair amount of time on the internet has at least heard about. I will personally admit to having only listened to perhaps a handful of them myself - at least to this point. I did, though, come into reading Podcasting for Dummies with a basic knowledge of how they were presented thanks to some digging on the internet to educate myself a while back.
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br /Not that it mattered. The book does a great job of outlining all the ins and outs of podcasting. No preliminary knowledge is required. Perhaps more importantly - at least for someone like me - the book isn't so painfully introductory that one with a working understanding of the subject feels like their time and money is wasted.
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br /I picked up Podcasting for Dummies because I've been thinking to start my own podcast and wanted to develop a more complete understanding of it all, and get some hints and tips on ways to make it all more efficient. That's exactly what I got, so I am definitely a satisfied customer.
Answers the curiosity questions
I picked this up simply because I was curious about podcasts as I hear people talking about them more and more.
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br /As with many dummies books; this is a great initiation for those that ask "What is...." This book takes you through the whole process of setting up and publishing a podcast. It even gives advice with equipment, handling interviews, and setting up sites for distributing your podcast.
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br /If you have never worked with the web, there are a couple chapters that might bore you as they deal with RSS and XML. They are more of an introduction but they might bore if not confuse people if they have never seen html.
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br /The book also gives suggestions about content, finding a niche and basically finding your place in the pod world. It even offers some answers to some legal issues that a person could run into if they are not careful such as publishing music.
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br /There are many links offered for further study
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br /Overall, this is a great book if you find yourself asking what's a podcast? It could answer the question "Is podcasting for you?"
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br /For me it's not something that interests me at the moment. However, I know much more after reading this book.
Short Sweet And To The Point
If you know nothing about "how" a podcast is made get this book, even if you don't plain to be a podcaster (I do tho!?) This book will give you a really good idea as to what goes into and what it takes to make a podcast.
br / Plus its a really easy read, and at time funny.Podcasting For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))
Works for smart people, too.
Disclosure/Disclaimer: I was a Tee Morris fan before I read this book. I still am. So obviously I was predisposed to like it.
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br /Wiley Publishing's `For Dummies' series is wildly popular in spite of the fact that most of us don't like to think of ourselves as Dummies. Fortunately, this book works just fine for smart people who don't happen to know much about podcasting, and there's a great companion podcast by Tee Morris. (Season 1 contains 20 episodes; Season 2 will accompany the sequel, which has the unlikely title of Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies.)
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br /The book is both readable and comprehensive, and includes plenty of humor (and not just in the cartoons before each section). I could do without the font used for the subheadings, but at least it's legible, and I presume they chose it to convey friendliness. Podcasting for Dummies walks you through the basics of choosing your equipment (microphones and mixers), using audio editing software, podcast blogs, RSS, bandwidth and hosting--and that's just chapter 2!
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br /It was Podcasting for Dummies I turned to when I needed to know how to put a music `bed' under a voice recording. (I later used that knowledge to record a comment for Tee Morris' podcast, The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy.) The explanation of bit rates, sample rates, and ID3 tags should be required reading, and the chapter on XML and RSS is a useful reference for moments when feeds won't validate. Indeed, the traditional `For Dummies' design makes it easy to use the book as a reference on any of the topics covered.
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br /The final section of the book is a series of Top Tens (types of podcast, most influential people in podcasting, reasons why podcasting won't kill radio--and reasons it will). Some of these lists, like specific links and details about software, may become obsolete quickly, but the principles remain sound and neither audio editing nor ID3 tags are going away any time soon.
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br /Many of the example podcasts used in the book relate to science fiction, reflecting the interests of the authors, and there's a wee bit of Macintosh bias in the screenshots. (Why are so many podcasters Mac users?) Those are just observations, though, not criticisms, and the inclusion of podiobooks.com is a boon to would-be podcasters who are either published or unpublished authors.
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br /One thing that is missing, at least from the first edition (I think I have the first edition, though they were up to the third printing by the time I got my copy at the PME last year), is any discussion of PodPress, the popular WordPress plugin for podcasting (used on this site for the Reports from the Asylum). Of course, PodPress was much less sophisticated at the time the book was written, and WordPress hadn't yet opened up the WordPress.com hosted service.
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br /It will be a great relief when the sequel to this book appears and Tee Morris can get back to podcasting.
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