Rounding Things Out

For other looks at technology, consider TechTV's Catalog of Tomorrow and Cabling: A Complete Guide to Network Wiring, both of which make nice companions to Smart Homes For Dummies.

Cabling: A Complete Guide to Network Wiring, while much more technical than Smart Homes for Dummies, is a thorough, and heavily illustrated guide towards creating a structured Ethernet wiring system. With its hardcover and 808 pages, it's also an excellent doorstop or hurricane-strength paperweight-but there's a lot of knowledge in between those covers. Installing a home Ethernet, such as Briere and Hurley recommend isn't that difficult (if I can do it, you can, too), and this book is an excellent guide to the technology.

While Cabling: A Complete Guide to Network Wiring is about as in-depth an analysis of a single technology as you can get, TechTV's Catalog of Tomorrow
is a fun "3000 mile view" of a variety of coming future technologies. Similar to Wired's Reality Check from 1996, however, it's much more detailed and thorough (if also a bit less fun). Any budding futurist would enjoy this book, although its environmental section is--at least to this skeptic--tainted by political correctness run amok. (Tech Central Station needs to do a libertarian version of this type of book-and fast!)

Delayed, But Far From Dead

Because of the dot.com collapse, it's easy to think that the Internet, and the technologies that it empowers is old news. But most of the future trends in each major area of home automation that Briere and Hurley first wrote about in 1999 are slowly coming to fruition, including HDTVand interactive TV, smart appliances, more advanced phone systems, and integrating home automation with the the Internet. As TechTV's Catalog of Tomorrow points out, there will be even more. And these books are a great way to get a home--and its owners--prepared to let them all in with everything but coffee and cheesecake for the welcoming party.