Most, if not all, of the information in the book could be found free on http://www.tivocommunity.com. If you find the information in Tivo Community difficult to understand you probably shouldn't be hacking your Tivo, and this book isn't worth $20.

If you are the type of person who builds PCs from scratch parts and you are also a Linux expert, this book is for you. Anyone else should take a long look before they buy it.

If you have a series2 Tivo read the bulleted points on page 223. Beware that one of the required items is very, very difficult to obtain.

I'd seen reviews of multiple books about TiVo, but I have a Series 2, so this was the only book that covered it. It was great! Within a few hours, I'd upgraded my Series 2 to 200+ hours of recording time, and it was easy. Hacking the Series 2s isn't covered in any other TiVo book, and I bought the Keegan book at a bookstore, but it was no help. Von Hagen's books could be a little better organized, but it worked for me. I recommend it highly!

CAUTION!!! Just finished upgrading the hard drive on my Series 1 TiVo. This book was full of errors and outdated information. Had I not bought Jeff Keegan's "Hacking TiVo" book at the same time as this book, I would have a TiVo boat anchor by now. Luckily, I am the cautious type and read both books before I started. I don't think the author, William von Hagen even proof read his work before it was published. Besides giving wrong information on setting up larger disk caches etc. the book was littered with lots of small typos such as MB instead of GB etc.
I did give this book an extra star for the user friendly language and explinations and the larger sized type. Jeff Keegan's book is a lot more technical, has less detailed explinations and smaller type.

This book is poorly organized. It has you flipping all through the book and leaving you frustrated as where to begin. I am not a novice. I am a computer programmer with win2000, xp and linux machines and still couldn't figure out where the 3.x tivo kernel is for the 2 Kernel monte method of getting a command prompt on the series 2. This is required to get anything to work on that system. It mentions nothing about mounting specific partitiions (4,7,9) in order to get your drive mounted to your machine. This book needed some serious usability testing from people who haven't hacked a series 2 before. I guess it will make for some good paper for my fireplace. Wait until something better comes out or find better info for free on the internet (which I had to do to get everything working).