Ubuntu book for "grandma" users

[H.S.]

nad wrote:
> Other than books, a better way to educate grandma about ubuntu is to simply stop by her house more often,


My query was based on a few people I know who are just now starting to
use computers. I myself have been giving a couple of them instructions
on how to go about a computer doing basic stuff. During all that, I have
tried to keep things general. That was on Windows.

My efforts to keep things general payed off when one of the persons was
able to use a Ubuntu installation without too much of a problem. I found
that very interesting. Clearly, instead of saying "use Internet Explorer
to read yahoo mail", I alway instructed "use your web browser to visit
Yahoo Mail web page", or "type this in Notepad" was "type this in your
text editor, in Windows you have Notepad to do that". When that person
explored the Ubuntu desktop, "web browser", "text editor", etc. all made
complete sense. After all, the basics of a user interface are more or
less the same in all desktops.

In my view, dumbing down Windows users ("IE is your internet") has done
a lot of damage. Some of that is also coming from the corporate culture
of "making things easy for the customer" which has, in this field, just
made "things dumber" actually.

Even though it is easy to help those people by visiting them, and it is
more rewarding and time efficient, I have also discovered some of them
actually want something of a reference text so that they can read up on
that at their leisure. Hence the query for simple basic textbooks.

thanks,
->HS