[book review]
From what I can tell I've read the most recent version of this book (4th edition, 2006) but Amazon seems to stack the reviews for each edition altogether. The book covers the history of hacking from phone phreaking in the days long before the internet and how this style of "mischief" became computer hacking. Topics include viruses, email spam, web censorship, spyware, identity theft and so on.
The main focus is education: to make you aware of what people can do to your computer and how to protect yourself. It provides a good overview of the possible threats to your computer, most of them from online sources, and it provides some details about what you can do to protect against them as well finding/removing threats that already exist. There is a light touch of humour through out so don't be worried about a possible dry/boring read.
There is some technical detail, and a few practical guides, but no advanced how-to guides. The book provides a broad scope but not a lot of depth. Fortunately it also provides refences to other resources that you can follow up with your own research. For someone with no background in computing then there will be a lot of new information, some of that information is dated due to a publication date of 2006, but some of the information was even dated in 06 (eg war dialling). From a perspective of posterity it is nice that the information is there but is essentially useless from a modern perspective where broadband is the norm.