Facebook: The Missing Manual

Facebook: The Missing Manual
Price: $19.99 USD
Facebook is the wildly popular, free social networking site that combines the best of blogs, online forums, photo sharing, clever applications, and interaction among friends. The one thing it doesn't have is a user's guide to help you truly take advantage of it. Until now. Facebook: The Missing Manual gives you a crystal clear and entertaining look at everything this fascinating Facebook phenomenon has to offer. Teeming with high-quality color graphics, each page in this Missing Manual is uniquely designed to help you with specific Facebook tasks, such as signing up, networking, shopping, joining groups, finding or filling a job, and a whole lot more. You'll discover how to create your page and make connections with other members in no time everybody who went to your school, for example, or those who work at your company or play on your soccer team. Then, bingo! Instant access to the personal and professional details of all the folks you're connected with, the people they're connected with, and so on, and so on. With Facebook: The Missing Manual, you learn to: Join a network, whether it's where you went to school, work-related, or based on other interests Look up old friends, find new ones, and decide who you'd like to keep track of Contact members by virtually poking them, or leaving notes on their message boards Get automatic updates from Facebook friends and send updates of your own Participate in groups of particular interest and meet up with members face-to-face Buy and sell using Facebook's marketplace and classified ads Find a job or hire employees by combing through the member pool Use Facebook as a collaboration tool to keep team members, co-workers, clients, and projects upto date Play it safe by using a multi-pronged approach to ensuring your privacy Think of Facebook as a 30-million-plus-entry searchable Rolodex on steroids! With help from this guide, you'll quickly get into the Facebook experience without getting in over your head.

Facebook: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: Five Tips and Tricks
1. Never check the "Remember me" box when logging onto the site. (Doing so puts your account at unnecessary risk and saves you very little time or effort.)
2. When you register for the site, use your actual birthday so that your friends will get an automatic heads-up a few days before the Big Day (all the better to fete you with).
3. Never add compromising photos or info to your Facebook profile; bosses, teachers, hiring managers, and others can use legitimate means to see your profile *even if* you think you've adjusted your privacy settings to prevent them.
4. If you're on Facebook to find a gig (or a date), be sure to sprinkle keywords liberally in your profile descriptions. Doing so ups the odds of your appearing in other members' searches.
5. Before you fill out your profile, first head to the main menu and click the "privacy" link (little-p) and follow the steps in Chapter 12 of the book to customize who gets to see how much of your personal information.

Facebook's popularity is skyrocketing, drawing more than 50 million people to this combination online village green, personal Web site creator, and souped-up address book. But one thing you won't get when signing up is a printed manual. Enter Facebook: The Missing Manual--your witty, authoritative, full-color guide to unlocking everything Facebook can do.

Facebook: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: Five Tips and Tricks

1. Never check the "Remember me" box when logging onto the site. (Doing so puts your account at unnecessary risk and saves you very little time or effort.)

2. When you register for the site, use your actual birthday so that your friends will get an automatic heads-up a few days before the Big Day (all the better to fete you with).

3. Never add compromising photos or info to your Facebook profile; bosses, teachers, hiring managers, and others can use legitimate means to see your profile *even if* you think you've adjusted your privacy settings to prevent them.

4. If you're on Facebook to find a gig (or a date), be sure to sprinkle keywords liberally in your profile descriptions. Doing so ups the odds of your appearing in other members' searches.

5. Before you fill out your profile, first head to the main menu and click the "privacy" link (little-p) and follow the steps in Chapter 12 of the book to customize who gets to see how much of your personal information.

About the Author

E. A. Vander Veer has authored or edited more than a dozen books to date, including PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual and PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual. Her work has appeared in dozens of on and offline publications, including Byte, The Writer, Salon.com, and CNN.com.

Author: E. Vander Veer
Publisher: Pogue Press
Customer Reviews
  • Great Book for Facebook Newbies, However Those Familiar With Facebook Won't Find Much of Use Within the Pages
    This is a great book for computer beginners and even those yet to or even who have just joined Facebook. It is certainly laid out in a lot more user friendly format than Facebook For Dummies, is easier to read, more colourful (Dummies is black and white on the inside), has better images, has more information (although a lesser word count) and is just a nicer looking book to read or flick through than Dummies. <br /> <br />What this book isn't though, is much use to those who have been on a Facebook for much time at all. There's really nothing new here that you wouldn't have discovered by clicking around on the site, answering requests from your Facebook friends or following the Facebook prompts for things like adding friends. If you don't know what I'm talking about don't worry, it's all explained in this book. <br /> <br />I am no expert on Facebook, I use it now pretty much to replace e-mail and upload photos but I haven't found one thing in this or Dummies I didn't really know. I didn't find it too daunting to do these tasks without a book such as this and encourage those wanting to use Facebook to just create an account and try it without one of these books. But for those that don't want to do that the Facebook the Missing Manual would be very useful. <br /> <br />This book also gives a bit of history on Facebook, the terminology such as Poke (I had no idea what this was until I read it in the Dummies book a week or so ago). Like Dummies I didn't find this book of much use to me but of the two I think is the better. <br /> <br />Like Dummies though Facebook has upgraded its look since this book was published so the images in here are a bit out of date. You can change your settings on Facebook back to the old look used in this book by clicking on the link up where all your profile/friends etc tabs are. New look has many more features though such as pictures on the normal wall so you'll update soon enough but if you need the tutorial of this book, that's a way to go. <br /> <br />I don't think most people with basic computer use knowledge will need this book but I think it's a great book for those who do.
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