Appealing to nerds with a sense of history, "Introduction to Microcomputers" was a book series launched initially in 1976 by a journalist of the budding industry, Adam Osborne.
After publishing Volume 1 in 1976, Osborne found he needed a more basic intro, which he called "Volume 0 - The Beginner's Book", written in 1977. Then in 1982 he published updated 2nd editions of vol. 0 and vol. 1. THIS review is for the 1982 2nd Edition of "Volume 0 - The Beginner's Book". I take pains to point all that out, as I have now acquired the 1977 1st edition, and found this 2nd edition is not a slight update but a significantly different book.
Here I'll just mention that the the 1977 version looked like a hobbyist production, with a cover and body full of hippie-ish hand art, and printed entirely on glare-inducing glossy paper for some inexplicable reason. This 2nd edition is much more mainstream and professional-looking, printed on normal paper, much like a textbook, and -- it does have some art, but somewhat improved art. Also, the 1st edition's personal computer pics were of the primordial 1st to 2nd generation Altair, Sol, and IMSAI computers. The 2nd edition has machines more familiar to retro computer enthusiasts, 3rd-to-4th generation PCs such as Apple II, Commodore PET, Sinclair ZX80, and IBM PC.
So this 2nd Edition from 1982 is a combination overview of the microcomputer market, types of equipment and peripherals, a buyer's guide, and an intro to computer science. By now Osborne had become a computer hardware entrepreneur himself and produced the Osborne 1, and this book mentions it (though credit where credit's due, he writes fairly and objectively about it when comparing choices on the market.)
This is the same Adam Osborne of the "Osborne Effect". As the story goes, when the Osborne 1 was approaching end of life in 1983, Osborne started hyping the next models -- which hype only killed off sales of the Osborne 1 prematurely and bankrupted the company. The true story may be a bit different in details but that's the legend that gave birth to the term "Osborne Effect": harming current sales by hyping a future product and causing people to delay purchases.
The 2nd Ed. was also co-written by David Bunnell, a familiar name in the early personal computer industry as an industry executive, writer, and magazine publisher.
IBM's new PC (just launched in 1981) merits a mention. Computer history buffs know that's when Microsoft made a deal to supply IBM with an operating system, what would come to be known as MS-DOS. And that event was key to Microsoft's fortunes. Microsoft was not an insignificant startup by this time, but until then was not a vendor of operating systems; it had to buy the initial version of DOS from a Seattle programmer, whom it then hired as an early Microsoft employee. IBM also offered the popular competing CP/M system from Gary Kildall, but Microsoft made DOS available for much cheaper and as the default, so that's what everyone chose. Kildall faded from the OS business and of course Microsoft became huge. Osborne didn't foresee all this at the time in 1982, and he writes that while the new IBM PC was offered with an OS "that is similar to, but not compatible with CP/M, the company announced it would soon offer a genuine CP/M operating system as an option." A few pages later Osborne elaborates on operating systems, explaining that there were many available at the time but by far the most popular was Kildall's CP/M -- which was used on the Osborne 1. No mention of Microsoft in that section.
Microsoft finally gets a mention in the section about BASIC, where Osborne credits BASIC's invention to John "Kemerry", butchering the name of Dartmouth's John Kemeny and ignoring his colleague and co-inventor Thomas Kurtz (kind of unpardonable for the 2nd edition of a book co-written by two industry vets!) But he does at least describe Microsoft of 1982 as a "major software company" -- up to this time Microsoft primarily had been a vendor of different adaptations of the BASIC language for different computer systems, but was indeed the largest pure-software company in the world.
More quaintness is a snapshot of the applications of the day: the dominant word processing program was WordStar for CP/M, the biggest "spread sheet" (two words) was the original one, VisiCalc, first written for the Apple II. Database programs were "computerized filing cabinets", and Osborne felt the ones available to microcomputers of the day were crap.
While the first half of the book overviews the types of microcomputers and software on the market at the time, and types of components such as printers and "rigid disks", the second half of the book goes into basic computer science. There is a tutorial on binary, octal, and hexadecimal math and logical operators which looked like a pretty good presentation of the topics (new to me was the word "nibble", which is 4 bits...so you have bits, nibbles, and bytes.) Then a section covering the basics of computer architecture. Skimming these Comp Sci sections I actually noticed a few things I've not seen before that were helpful. For example, Osborne gives an explanation of just why writing directly in assembly language makes for faster programs than writing in a high-level language and then compiling it ... a fact I've known but I've never seen an explanation as to why a compiler doesn't do an optimum job. If I knew a kid studying computer science I'd give them this book.