Shiva Iyer at Packt Publishing kindly sent me a review copy of Instant OpenELEC Starter. It’s an ebook with a list price of £5.99, and I was able to download .pdf and .mobi versions (with an .epub option too). It’s also available from Amazon as a paperback (£12.99) and for Kindle (£6.17).

The book is pretty short, with a table of contents that runs to 35 pages, and it’s set at an introductory level that seems intended for new users of OpenELEC and XBMC.

It breaks down roughly into thirds:

1. Installation (with instructions for PC and Raspberry Pi).
2. Managing XBMC – the basics of creating content libraries for various media.
3. Top 10 features – some slightly more advanced customisations.

If you’re after a detailed explanation of what OpenELEC is, and how it’s put together then you’ll need to look elsewhere.

I could pick holes in some of the details of the Raspberry Pi install guide, but the information is accurate enough. Overall the author, Mikkel Viager, has done a good job of explaining what’s required and how to do things.