Technology books frequently have a very brief shelf life before they go stale. How many how-to books do you gathering dust on your shelf, or have donated to Good Will, on the subjects of DOS, Windows 3.1, Word 2.0, or even older technologies?

Which is why it's always surprising to see one such book that's aged pretty well. It's on home automation, a subject that can often be a daunting task to learn more about. Many of us start with an interest in one field (for me, it was home theater), then want to learn more. It can be a slow learning curve to get up to speed on lighting, security, electricity, whole-house audio and video, computers, and all the other areas that home automation incorporates. So in 1999, a couple of years into my odyssey of giving my home some smarts, I was thrilled to have stumbled over Smart Homes for Dummies by Danny Briere and Pat Hurley.

If you've been put off by the title and concept of this series ("Hey, I'm no dummy, I know enough about technology to be online reading Blogcritics, for Christ sakes!"), then rest easy. This is a terrific summary of all of the areas of home automation that will allow anyone to get "the big picture."

Focus on the Infrastructure

And while it's original edition was retired after nearly three years on the shelf, it actually aged quite nicely. Perhaps because Beire and Hurley focused on concepts and technologies rather than products, perhaps the most important of which is focus on the infrastructure of the home--you can always change the endpoints, and what gets attached to them later. As Briere says, "that's really what the goal of the book was: to put together a big picture view, and almost a design paradigm for people when they were trying to approach the topic of a home for 20 or 30 years. You know, people will put a 20 or 30-year roof on their house, but they don't think about that when they come to do their wiring, or things they put in the wall.

"And that was one of things that we really wanted to get into people's heads" Briere emphasizes. "Put something into the wall that will last 20, 30, 40 years, and worry about what you put on the endpoints later on. Because once the infrastructure is in the walls, you can change the endpoints and you can have all sorts of flexibility in the endpoints. But if you rip out walls later on, it gets really expensive."