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Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition)
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual is exactly what you'd expect if you've read any of Pogue's other books or columns: it's clear and straightforward without seeming dumbed down. His writing tends to be fairly light and often funny, making for particularly readable technical books. That's not to say it's without substance, though -- within the first chunk of this book (which is pushing six hundred pages) I'd already had a dozen of my existing questions answered as well as plenty I hadn't even thought to wonder about.
It seems pretty definitely directed at people who've been using Mac OS for a long time and are switching to OS X. Given what OS X is, it's not surprising that it takes some getting used to, despite vaguely looking like Mac OS. If you've never used OS 8 or 9 and don't have any existing Mac habits to unlearn, you might not even need a book like this -- but I suspect it would still be pretty useful. Pogue also takes time to address issues people might have switching to OS X from Unix or Windows, but the focus is on comparisons to older versions of Mac OS. As the title implies, Apple documentation tends to be slim to non-existent, and this is by far the most thorough OS X book I've seen yet. It functions exactly as promised -- I keep my copy on the shelf over my desk, and when I have a question about something I remember from OS 9 or why something I know from BSD doesn't work under 10.2, I can just look it up.
The second edition is more of the same -- the book is bigger, fatter, and covers Jaguar. It was published in October 2002, so it's not quite up to the minute, but it's certainly not outdated yet. I shelled out another twenty bucks when I first saw it, and I don't regret it -- the only major complaint I'd had about the first edition was that its usefulness was somewhat impaired when 10.2 came out. It's possible I'll feel the same way about the second edition when faced with 10.3 -- but maybe Pogue will write another book.
I would recommend this book for just about every OS X user, regardless of how recently you switched -- people who installed it back during the public beta will probably get just as much out of the second edition as those who just bought their first-ever Mac. However, you'll probably find it more useful if you're coming from older versions of Mac OS than if you've just switched from another Unix or Windows, but that's not to say it isn't worth reading in those cases. It's relatively cheap for an O'Reilly book (712 pages, list price is $29.95) so you can't really go wrong.
You can purchase OS X: The Missing Manual from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
She doesn't see tech-minded people buying how-to books for the OS proper, or at least not when they first buy the computers. Personally I've never felt a need, and my 9-year-old kids were comfortable immediately in OS X, tweaked every setting they had access to without a blink.
(But "intensely thorough"? Is intensity really the quality you're looking for in a reference? I imagine cracking the binding in my haste to pore, hot-eyed, over some crucial command line syntax...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
This review told me practically nothing! What does this book have in it that is good for geeks?
Okay, so it's been updated and it's fatter and you like it and it's good for people who used pre-OSX Macs. Personally, I never used a pre-OSX Mac -- why is it good for me?
You describe it as a thorough book, but barely give me an idea of it's contents.
I became a Mac user only after Apple moved to MacOS X - a modern, UNIX-based OS.
I have neither the desire, the time, nor the inclination to learn anything about Mac OS 9, 8, or earlier versions. I avoided these for many years ( because they were unstable, unpreemptive, un-interoperable, and unneccessary for an ungraphic artist like myself.) and it is even less neccessary for me to learn them now that they are legacy.
I love MacOS X. It gives me a great, pretty, powerful, easy-to-use environment that I don't have to think about 95% of the time, with the option of a CLI terminal/shell for those 5% of the times when I do. It would be fun to learn more about MacOS X, which is - as you know - a very very different OS than its predecessors.
Won't someone write an indepth book on Mac OS X that doesn't contain uneccessary and often confusing references to obsolete virgins I know little (and care less) about.
First: Put a terminal window up on your task bar. Then it is no longer hidden and all the man pages, perl, vi, whatever you want is right there.
:-)
Next check out the following books
Learning Unix for Mac OS X
by Dave Taylor, Jerry Peek
Mac OS X in a Nutshell (already mentioned)
by Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek (Contributor), Chris Stone (Contributor)
and certainly the already mentioned
Mac OSX for Unix Geeks - with no picures - just like a terminal window
That said - as a 2 week newbie on OSX - I found the OSX Missing Manual helpful to getting started. I have previous experience on WinBlow$, BSD Unix, and Linux. The transition was not hard - and part of the big sell is certainly the BSD Unix - and access to being able to install XWindows, and creating a similar environment to what is there on the other systems with KDE, Gnome and all the goodies that go with that.
Mac OS X for Unix Geeks
by Brian Jepson, Ernest E. Rothman