That's where My Xbox really shines. Everything is illustrated in full color, with screenshots showing the look of the menus and options. The book does a pretty decent job of explaining why you would want to do things, which is a pretty important part of such a technical book. It's pretty much the "why this is cool, and why you want to try it" part of a technical book that makes the difference between sleepyville and an interesting read. A good example of this is the section on installing a game to your hard drive. I had forgotten that a good reason you'd want to do this is to save wear and tear on your disc drive. It had been so long since I'd worn out a disc drive that I'd almost forgotten about this, but yep, this is a really cool reason to install a game, and hence, keep reading.
This is not to say there aren't some parts of the book that could use work. One paragraph on the new Cloud Saved Game feature was particularly confusing (which is bad when this is a topic that is already confusing for a lot of people):
If you no longer have an Xbox LIVE Gold membership, you will not be able to select your roaming profile or a Cloud Saved game. Your files are still stored in the cloud and can be moved out of cloud storage to a local storage device. You can do this even if the file does not exist in the console's memory cache.
The confusing part is, this section was labeled "It's not all good." So that leads me to believe this paragraph should be negative. Yet it seems like my Cloud games are always available (which would be a positive), I just need to move them to my Xbox. Yet from reading this paragraph, I'm not 100% sure that's the correct conclusion.
There was this, and also the fact that some sections could have used even more illustration, especially the Kinect section. I suppose the Kinect is something that should be intuitive, but I've seen enough people struggle with it, and enough lighting problems to know that a guide on this could be very valuable. This section of the book was decent, highlighting the basics of Kinect setup and lighting, but it could have been a lot more thorough, perhaps with some live pictures as examples.
But lets get real, most gamers have dug around in the menus, we know what Cloud Saved Games are, what achievements are, we know how to block a nasty player from our games, we know how to install games, etc. Is there any reason for the gamer elite to own this book? Well, yes and no. There's nothing in this book that you couldn't figure out on your own, or a problem you couldn't solve when it arises by checking out Xbox.com support. But there's a certain amount of value to the organization of this information. With all the new features that have come with the latest dashboard update, it's also just hard to keep up with the sheer number of new things your Xbox can do. A book like this gives you a way to learn about these features without having to experiment with them first. It's also nice to have a reference guide sometimes, just to know all the different outputs and capabilities of your console.
