Mike Halsey - The IT Support Handbook: A How-To Guide to Providing Effective Help and Support to IT Users

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484251324 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

With many thanks to Gwenan Spearing and James DeWolf for making all of this possible.

About the Author

Mike Halsey

is a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) awardee, since 2011, and technical expert. As the author of Windows 7, 8, and 10 troubleshooting books and associated videos, he is well versed in the problems and issues faced by PC users, IT pros, and system administrators when administering and maintaining all aspects of a PC ecosystem. Mike is a teacher and prolific author who uses his training to educate people about complex subjects in simple and straightforward ways.

Originally from the United Kingdom, Mike now lives a simpler and less complicated life in the South of France with his two rescue collies, Evan and Robbie.

About the Technical Reviewer

Massimo Nardone

has more than 24 years of experiences in Security, Web/Mobile development, Cloud, and IT Architecture. His true IT passions are Security and Android.

He has been programming and teaching how to program with Android, Perl, PHP, Java, VB, Python, C/C++, and MySQL for more than 20 years.

He holds a Master of Science in Computing Science from the University of Salerno, Italy.

He has worked as a Project Manager, Software Engineer, Research Engineer, Chief Security Architect, Information Security Manager, PCI/SCADA Auditor, and Senior Lead IT Security/Cloud/SCADA Architect for many years.

His technical skills include Security, Android, Cloud, Java, MySQL, Drupal, Cobol, Perl, Web and Mobile development, MongoDB, D3, Joomla, Couchbase, C/C++, WebGL, Python, Pro Rails, Django CMS, Jekyll, Scratch, and so on.

He worked as visiting lecturer and supervisor for exercises at the Networking Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto University). He holds four international patents (PKI, SIP, SAML, and Proxy areas).

He currently works as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Cargotec Oyj, and he is member of ISACA Finland Chapter Board.

Massimo has been reviewing more than 45 IT books for different publishing companies, and he is the coauthor of Pro Android Games (Apress, 2015), Pro JPA 2 in Java EE 8 (Apress 2018), and Beginning EJB in Java EE 8 (Apress, 2018).

Theres often an interesting story as how people got started with a career in IT support. In my case I was a tinkerer; I wanted to know what was inside the case and how things were made. This meant that whenever I had access to a computer, be it my own Sinclair ZX81, Spectrum or QL, or the Apple II or IBM PC that my father brought home from work, I would pull it apart to see what it was made of.

Its possible really that I could have been an engineer though I didnt have much of an understanding of semiconductors or electrical resistance. Studying electronics for a while when I was 16 didnt really help either as I was far more interested in programming and the user experience.

Inevitably however this led me to build an aptitude with computers which my parents spotted early on and encouraged. From the age of 11, I was never very far from a computer, even having one as my constant travel companion for most of my late teens and right through my 20s in the form of the Psion Organisers and Series 3 and Series 5 PDAs. Today I own the reborn Psion, the Gemini, for which I demonstrated my love for the form factor by becoming the person who wrote the official user guide.