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Learning UNIX for Mac OS X
For starters, I was annoyed to find that the book's title implied a larger format than the 139 pages it comprises. The book has an audience problem because of its size. UNIX guys like thick books. Is this book mostly for newbies to OS X, to UNIX, or to Mac OS X's implementation of UNIX? Despite this targeting problem, the book's contents are still useful, but I think its audience is more geared to new UNIX users. The book just doesn't have much depth for even a reference title, especially for a topic such as UNIX, and particularly for a new, little-documented UNIX family operating system such as OS X.
While Mac OS X is a BSD variant, it has a few idiosyncrasies that may throw off a veteran UNIX user, and this book manages to address most, if not all of these notable problems. For instance, Dave notes problems in sendmail that prevent it from working from the command line in Mac OS X's Terminal application, and presents a fix for the problem. If you use command lines in UNIX all the time, the book does present good instructions on getting Lynx, IRC, newsgroups, pine, and the like up and running in Terminal. The book shies away (quite appropriately) from any graphic interface items unless required, such as when changing Terminal's preferences.
This book was very recently published (May 2002) but already has fallen behind with the release of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Some components of Jaguar, such as CUPS support for stronger printing options, are completely missing from this book. If you have Jaguar installed on your computer, don't dive headlong into the NetInfo Manager steps for LPR printer configuration. Books typically don't age this fast, but in the case of this book, small changes seem to mean a lot to this title's usefulness -- the introduction of CUPS may have made Chapter 5's contents almost irrelevant.
Another small nag involves the lack of information on useful commands for Mac OS X users that weren't available (or were difficult to find) with the old Mac OS 9. One such command, cron, makes my life easier for handling some tasks on my home computer. It's not even mentioned in this book, nor will you find much information on shell scripting or compiling UNIX code you might happen to find. I guess I'm most annoyed at the lack of compile information since the Apple Developer Connection marked this book as a Recommended Title.
Despite our fondness for (and tolerance of the slightly-higher prices of) Macintosh computers, Mac users aren't made of money and don't like to buy a bookstore's worth of tomes for basic information. It would have made a lot of sense to talk more about compiling software since Apple's software or other GUI products don't meet or can configure all UNIX needs. And I won't even talk about the lack of coverage about XDarwin, an application that starts XFree86 within a Mac OS X installation, allowing X Window applications to run atop or in tandem with the OS X interface. XDarwin has become popular enough for it to become part of the stable XFree86 distribution. Given that not every UNIX user is a command-line freak, this is a pretty critical omission in my mind.
So, who should buy this book?
If you are completely new to UNIX and have been a gooey-kiddie who's used almost nothing except Mac OS 9, this is a very good reference to get your toes moist with UNIX. However, as drug dealers say, "the first taste is free." This book will leave you wanting more detailed information. More experienced UNIX users can probably find out what they need about Mac OS X's command line from a few free locations such as Mac OS X Hints.
One last thing: A pox upon Tim O'Reilly for not using the platypus for the animal on the book's cover. Given that the open-source core operating system of Mac OS X is named Darwin and has a nicely-modified take-off on the BSD mascot that depicts both the name of the OS and its BSD origins, I would think that O'Reilly would have jumped on this obvious cover.
You can purchase Learning UNIX for Mac OS X from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I've been having major problems with OS X Server 10.2 thats driving me insane.
:/
Thinking in a more unix way, I starting trying to hunt down the proccess involved..but all to no avail. I couldnt find any proccesses that seemed to be having problems..and was told by a friend in the know that my issue was more of a mac gui thing...something I know nothing about
A good decent book on OS X Server 10.2 would be really nice at the moment
"Enlightenment is your ego's biggest disappointment." --Yoginanda
Moof!
It sounds like the book he really wanted to get was O'Reilly's Mac OS X for Unix Geeks. It includes a lot of his gripe topics like:
* A quick overview of the Terminal application
* Understanding Open Directory (LDAP) and NetInfo
* Issues related to using the GNU C Compiler 9GCC
* Library linking and porting Unix software
* An overview of Mac OS X?s filesystem and startup processes
* Creating and installing packages using Fink
* Building the Darwin kernel
* Running X Windows on top of Mac OS X
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
UNIX guys like thick books
That's a misnomer, My Kernighan & Ritchie C book gets a lot of use and it's only ~280 pages. Large does not espessially mean better.
yes microsoft as microsoft own 51% of shares in apple since 1996 i think
Jesus! What kinda smoke have you been inhaling?
MS bought 150M $ USD worth of NON-voting shares of Apple back in 1996. That's peanuts. Apple was worth net 2.1 billion at that time.
That's nowhere near 51%.
Besides, you're factually wrong to start with. BSD was a set of tools that sat on top of AT&T's Unix. It eventually grew so large it required only a few files to become it's own OS. That was the kernel. They eventually got that.
Mac OS X (or, Darwin, actually) is entirely FreeBSD (some tidbits of NetBSD too), except for the microkernel, which is Mach (no relation to "Mac").
And YES, Darwin/Mac OS X *IS* Unix, as it has licensed the trademark from the Open Group, the rightful owner of the trademark.
What makes a Unix is not the kernel. It's how the package operates and how well is follows the standards (such as but not limited to Posix). The Unix trademark is awarded upon proper registration and evaluation of the OS. There are costst involved, is is pretty much the only thing that keeps Linux being called a real Unix.
Also, O'Reilly already used a platypus for "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL", so no dice there.
However, I just got an idea to somehow play off of the BSD Daemon/Apple connection by using a picture of the story of the devil offering Eve fruit from the tree of knowledge. Also sort of a connection to Darwin via the evolution/creationism debate.
OK, so it's a pretty big stretch ;-)
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
The book has an audience problem because of its size. UNIX guys like thick books. Is this book mostly for newbies to OS X, to UNIX, or to Mac OS X's implementation of UNIX? Despite this targeting problem.....
This is crazy!!! There is no "targeting problem" -- the book is written for people who are new to UNIX -- that is the target audience. The book is right on for this crowd. As mentioned by others, there are other books that the UNIX savvy will find useful. -- Why would someone who owns "Unix PowerTools" or "Essential System Administration" even consider bying a book with "Learning Unix" in the title???
It sounds to me like the review was a result of misunderstanding. He was hoping for a "OS X UNIX for UNIX geeks" book, when it sounds to me like it's actually meant to be a "the basics of UNIX for OS X n00bs" book, which certainly has its place. A lot of MacOS 7-9 users are totally new to sed, awk, grep, cron, and the common UNIX directory layout. A simple UNIX primer from a good publisher like O'Reilly Press could be very handy for some of them.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Here is a MacOS X UNIX tutorial I just found yesterday. If you're an old time Mac user or just want to learn some UNIX commands then this is something you might want to check out...
http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
If you want a really, seriously, thick book on OS X (probably a bit dated post-Jaguar), try "OS X Unleashed". It covers both the Mac and Unix sides. The X Window System is covered, as is setting up a mail or ftp server, programming in Perl, using MySQL, even installing Lynx (if you want a text based browser).
;)
It makes a great reference book, and comes in real handy whenever you need a heavy, if slightly soft, weight around the house.
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I have been looking through the admin guide and I realized one big thing: dead tree docs are so much better than electronic docs! I am seriously thinking about printing the whole damn guide and binding it. The only thing holding me back is just what you said, the guide is way too general.
I want a very in-depth guide, or set of guides, similar to the old Inside Macintosh series, but for MacOS X Server admin. So what if it covers Unix topics, or GUI topics? Cover it all and break it down into modules that you can buy and read as you want. Have an intro book for general topics, have a book on mail, a book on web serving, a book on firewalls and NAT, etc. I'm sure Netinfo and LDAP will take a book just by themselves.
The point is that these introductory Mac books just don't cut it any more. They are all pretty much clones of each other and they tell you simple stuff like how to set up your web browser. That's great for the home user, but it does nothing for the professional system administrator looking to use Macs.
Sapere aude!
I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".
Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.
Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.
Mac users will require more initial hand-holding to become comfortable with the command line. And they'll need instant gratification to convince them that dealing with such an apparently-archaic interface is worth the effort.
If you know someone who is in this situation, get them:
- The latest version of BBEdit.
- An easy-to-use shell scripting book as a reference. Reading a book like Teach Yourself Shell Programming from beginning to end is going to either bore them or scare them off. But as they are experimenting at their own pace and discovering just what they can do with shell scripting, they'll want a reference to thumb through for solutions to the problems they encounter.
Start them out with something simple and relatively familiar, like df, and explain what information it provides.Then show them df | bbedit. They'll feel more comfortable seeing a connection between the GUI world they know.
Then shown them df | grep disk0s9 | bbedit.
And df | grep disk0s9 | awk '{print "Disk Size: " $2/2000 " MB"}'.
Work on basic one-liners first, then show them sed, head, tail, wc, etc. And when you go to show them something new one day and you discover that they wrote something on their own purely because they were interested, you know the fire has been lit.
And if they have any doubts about the value of shell scripting, show them the Linux version of my Buddy program, which is really just a collection of over 70 shell scripts (most of which are reasonably-well commented) and explain that the Mac OS X version is just the Linux version with an AppleScript Studio GUI slapped on top.