As you can see in Figure A, they're all lined up, ready to do battle.

FIGURE A

We pit seven iPod books against each other. Click picture for a larger image.

It's a player book playbook and you're invited for a ring-side seat.

iPod Fan Book
Entering into the ring clad in nothing but a light green sleeve is the 96-page lightweight, the iPod Fan Book, by Yasukuni Notomi and published, surprisingly, by O'Reilly. As you can see in Figure B, this is a tiny book.

FIGURE B

It's cute and pretty, but it's not what you'd expect from O'Reilly. Click picture for a larger image.

This is a pretty, little book with nice four-color pictures. Although it doesn't provide you with much more than basic usage information, it would be a nice companion to your first iPod. We found a few interesting tips, including how to rip DVD audio to your iPod and how to encode your audio using different encoders than come with iTunes.

At $14.95, you're not really going to learn much you don't know. If you're a total iPod newbie or don't like to read much, this book's for you. Otherwise, you're probably going to be disappointed.

OUR RATING: 3 of 5

But then, I launched iTunes. I got a huge shock when I found out that all my files were gone. iTunes had, without any reason, deleted all of my music, audio books, and podcasts from my PC's hard drive. They were, quite simply, gone.

In a bit of a panic, I then fired up my iPod. To my relief, everything was on the iPod. Fortunately, my music collection fit on the iPod's drive and it was all there. Yes, I rigorously backup our network, but I hadn't considered my music important enough to merit a current backup (a mistake, admittedly).

The challenge was, how was I going to get the music that was on the iPod back into iTunes? I called Apple support. After all, I'd paid for AppleCare on both my iPod and on my wife's. I figured, with the extra insurance from AppleCare, surely Apple would tell me how to recover my files.