If you're not familiar with the Dummies books, then you need to know that they aren't written for dummies, at all. They are written for people who are trying to learn about something new to them, so the books don't assume anything beyond the most basic sort of knowledge and skills. In the case of this book, it assumes you have a computer and access to the Internet and are comfortable with basic skills like using a Web browser, and writing email.

The first three chapters are mostly about what blogging is, and why you might want to blog. The next six walk you through, step by step with screen shots, the entire process of creating a Google account, and starting a blog, including things like themes and customizing them, and choosing a layout and widgets to include, and what to have on your Home page, how to post, and how to create feeds and set up services. You can follow along step by step. Subsequent sections talk about how to attract and keep readers, how to make money from a blog via affiliate advertising services like AdSense, how to obtain a domain of your own, and even how to delete a blog.

Ms. Gunelius' explanations are quite straight forward and easy to follow. She falters a bit sometimes in that she uses marketing and PR-speak (blogs are not organic; they do not "grow") and is a bit shaky regarding the difference between a URL and a domain. Her coverage of using Blogger to post to a domain and server you control is scant, and a little flawed; she assumes, for instance, that you can use the same templates on a self-hosted domain that you can use hosting on Blogspot. You can't. It would have been more helpful to cover at least in passing how to make simple modifications to HTML and CSS in templates, like changing a font or a background color, or at least to have pointed to Google's own Help for those.

Over all though, this is a good step-by-step introduction to blogging with Google's Blogger, written for the person who is completely unfamiliar with blogging. Like all Dummies books, it doesn't matter where you start really, so if you just want to get a blog up and running, you can skip the first section entirely—though I wouldn't recommend skipping it.