We've been following its progress since the Longhorn-code-name days, and there were news reports that went about calling it "shorthorn," mostly because WinFS was dropped from what is now Vista. However, even without WinFS- and without some of the other trappings that Longhorn was supposed to ship with -you'll find, when you use it, that Windows Vista is quite the wonderful new operating system it was supposed to be.
This book doesn't assume, one way or the other, that you have Vista installed. If you do, this is a quick-start guide; if you don't, this is a sneak-peek. Read it and decide whether it's what you wanted it to be.
For those curious about how it all came to b, we have, in Chapter2, how vista evolved; for those just curious, we have Chapters 3 and 4, where we go into what's new and what's inside the new OS. Then on, we get to describing how things work in vista, with, naturally, an emphasis on how the working departs from XP (which, we're assuming, most of you are currently using).