BitTorrent for Dummies

Product Description

Share your home movies or download new software

Find safe files to download, create your own, and use BitTorrent for business

There's certainly a torrent of interest in BitTorrent! But while it enables you to download all kinds of cool files and to distribute your own creative efforts, it also carries some risks. This book not only shows you how to acquire BitTorrent, but also how to use it without picking up worms, viruses, and lawsuits.

Discover how to
* Select, download, and install a BitTorrent client
* Manage and store files you download
* Choose software for making movies and audio files
* Understand the legal risks of file sharing
* Trim business costs with BitTorrent
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #359714 in Books
* Published on: 2005-10-14
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 336 pages


Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover
Share your home movies or download new software

Find safe files to download, create your own, and use BitTorrent for business

There's certainly a torrent of interest in BitTorrent! But while it enables you to download all kinds of cool files and to distribute your own creative efforts, it also carries some risks. This book not only shows you how to acquire BitTorrent, but also how to use it without picking up worms, viruses, and lawsuits.

Discover how to

* Select, download, and install a BitTorrent client
* Manage and store files you download
* Choose software for making movies and audio files
* Understand the legal risks of file sharing
* Trim business costs with BitTorrent

About the Author
Susannah Gardner is the creative director of Hop Studios, a Web design company specializing in custom publishing solutions, and the author of Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies. She has also worked for The Los Angeles Times Web site and taught online journalism for the University of Southern California.

Kris Krug is a writer, designer, photographer, and Web aficionado based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Customer Reviews

Fantastic to get you started with BitTorrent5
I've always been a fan of "For Dummies" books. I can't get enough of them, and learning there was one of these titles about BitTorrent made my day, since I had been very much in the dark about this technology... in general in the dark about anything remotely related to Peer-to-Peer for more than three years. So I gave the book by Susannah Gardner and Kris Krug a shot, and it was all that I expected.

After a primer on the technology, the purpose of BitTorrent in the spectrum of peer-to-peer protocols out there and tools to find, download and manage torrents, the book deals head on with the copyright implications of downloading illegal torrents, offering resources to help find legal (and fun) torrent material.

While a few of the chapters were about topics that were slightly peripheral to the main subject (production and promotion of torrents, for instance), the bulk of the book was fantastic for the newbie (a.k.a. ME!) to get on the know about BitTorrent and start getting my first streams of torrent juice flowing into my machine's hard drive. [...]

easy to use client4
Gardner describes the basic idea behind BitTorrent. How someone downloading runs a BitTorrent client that can in turn upload portions of a file to another client. This is the distinguishing characteristic of the network, as realised by Bram Cohen.

You can see from the book that the client is easy to obtain from various websites, and easy to set up and run. The etiquette is that if you download a file, that you should keep your client connected to the net. So that it can answer quests from others. Which is probably how you were able to quickly get the file in the first place.

While the book advises that you should not download copyrighted material like movies, one has to wonder how many readers will actually desist.

Complete Users Manual With Additional Information5
Napster was a program/company/concept that excited millions of people before it blew up because of violating copyright laws. Other organizations such as KaZaA came in to do the same thing but were careful to not violate the copyright laws that got Napster. The critical thing was that Napster facilitated illegal copying by providing users with technical support. Huh? you might well be saying, but this comes from Chapter 6 on Understanding BitTorrent and the Law.

BitTorrent is a freeware package (but the developer will accept donations) that facilitates peer to peer file sharing. It is perfectly legal to use for the copying of non-copyrighted material. This book, like most of the 'For Dummies' books is a complete introduction to using the software and includes a lot of extra comments on sites that have BitTorrent materials for downloading, on searching for additional content, on using BitTorrent for distribution of materials inside large organizations.

Like with most of their books, it is well written, covers the material well, and is quite complete.