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Mac OS X in a Nutshell
The Gist The book is quite well structured, and organized into into 5 parts. The first is a quick overview of the Macintosh GUI. The second part, "System Configuration," is mainly devoted to getting the system running well (covering preferences, networking, the file system and Java). The third section, "System and Network Administration," is a good guide to several lower-level tasks, including an excellent chapter on directory services and NetInfo. The fourth is about development, including Apple's IDE "Project Builder" and CVS. The final part covers the Unix underpinnings of OS X and X Windows. This includes a Unix command reference of over 200 pages.
The Good The book is also well written, with light, easily understood prose and some good screen dumps, tables and diagrams to make some of the more complex points easily understood. I appreciate the detailed contents section, good quality index and black chapter tabs at the side of each page for finding the information I need.
Everything seems to be covered, though you may sometimes find yourself needing to go elsewhere for more depth, but this is really only to expected in a book that is trying more for breadth across an entire operating system than depth in one particular area.
Despite having used and developed on a Mac for over 15 years and OS X since the late beta stage I still found myself discovering something new and useful every few pages in the book.
The Bad The section of the book I appreciated least was the Unix Command Reference. 200 pages, most of which are adequately covered by the online man pages or a quick 'command --help'. Not that it isn't useful having this information on paper, and not that this section isn't more complete than the man pages and less error-ridden. It's just that my favourite operating system has a large number of commands that are hard to find by name alone. Online, I tend to rely on apropos to find what I need. Back when you paid a large amount of money for a Unix license they came with hard copy manuals that included a permuted word index of the same top slug that apropos searches, which made them infinitely more useful. O'Reilly could improve the heck out of this book by giving us the same thing for what I felt was otherwise an almost totally wasted 200 pages (though I admit that the combination of the chapter on NetInfo and the command references for nicl and niutil etc. actually have me now understanding and using NetInfo well.)
Once again O'Reilly have provided a web page for the book that is mostly marketing material -- though in this case the Errata page is useful. At the bottom of the page they have a number of links to "Related O'Reilly Articles" but have only listed three by the authors of the book, leaving out, for example, X11 and Open Office on Mac OS X by Wei-Meng Lee and Configuring sendmail On Jaguar by James Duncan Davidson to name two MacDevCenter articles I've found incredibly helpful.
Conclusion
This book is not quite in the "must buy" category. If you do want a book to help you with the more technical aspects of OS X or to help you move to OS X from Unix or Windows hacking then this one is worth a serious look. It certainly better covers the technical aspects than OS X Bible and others of that style (such as the Missing Manual or Robin Williams' Little Mac OS X Book.) The only other volume that really compares is OS X Unleashed and it has way too much coverage of the simple stuff and the various applications, is not as well structured and has a wordier, less terse and technical style. It's also more expensive and twice the size and weight.
You can purchase Mac OS X in a Nutshell from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This is the first O'Reilly Review I can remember without a mention of the Sample Chapter O'Reilly is known to provide.
(Blatant Kerma whoring, but I immediately "dug" to find is, so I thought I'd post it.)
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
it's been said here before I think, but this is a great site with tons of usefull (also sometimes stupid) osx info.
Some really funky applescript stuff, some lame bash scripts & much gui tweaks, but I've found a lot of fixes for problems that no apple docs could help me with.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
If you are indeed a Unix geek, go to macosxhints.com and you'll find a lot more useful information there for free.
"The problem with many of these books, though, is that they aren't where the masses will find them. I go into my local B&N and there may be a dozen or two titles tops that relate to the Mac, compared with the hundreds for Windows and other stuff."
Well, the Barnes & Noble, Borders and Fry's here in Austin have the Mac well covered. Austin's a nice town, too.
I pre-ordered this book from amazon. I am a network admin and about half the machines I support are MacOSX. This book has provided me with alot of usful hints and tips that I now use on a regular basis. Although this book is NOT *must-read*, it did provide me with some good info and I would recommend it to anyone that uses OSX on a regular basis.
Do you mean that you don't want to have to got to the Finder application to get to the Applications folder to find a list of your applications? You'd rather have something like Windows' Start button? You can drag folders, including your Home folder or the Applications folder to the dock (the section past the divider near the Trash). Then you can right-click those always-available folders to list their contents. Very similar to a Start button.
6) I want the maximise button (the +) to fscking well maximise. I don't mean 'get bigger' - I WILL DRAG THE WINDOW IF I WANT THAT. I WANT YOU TO MAXIMISE.
Maximizing in Windows works because all an application's windows are contained within the parent window. The Mac way is to have windows be separate elements on the screen independent of each other. So it doesn't make sense to have a maximize function fill the screen with any one window. The green light button makes the window as large as it needs to be based on what it contains. So for a web browser showing a page like Slashdot it would expand vertically to fill the screen but not horizontally where it is not necessary.
9) I don't want to wait 10 minutes to boot up, which it sometimes feels like I have to.
Yikes, I am running OS X on a G3/233 with only 160MB RAM and I don't wait anywhere near 10 minutes to boot up. But then I hate it when people trivialize my concerns because it doesn't happen to them. Sorry.
1) Get fruit menu it does exactly what you want in terms of a "start menu" for OSX
.DS_Store. That's where mac's store information regarding finder preferences.
2) Shart cut keys are pretty universal across mac applications. Learn them once in general. Its not like Unix or Windows
3) If you want to understand file formats go to the developer website on www.apple.com. The file system is fairly complicated since its a compromise between the old apple unix, next and OS9 file system. However there is no such thing as a
4) In terms of the finder do a websearch on
5) If you have links to files in applicatiosn that won't run something is wrong
6) Macs boot up faster than windows or linux machines so if its taking 10 minutes do a verbose boot and see what is going wrong.
1) Drag your Applications folder to the Dock, and right-click (or control-click, or click-and-hold) to get the menu you're looking for.
2) This works just fine. Make sure "Always open folders in a new window" is checked in Finder Preferences, and hold down the Option key while double-clicking a folder if you don't want the previous window to stay open. But that's just my recommendation as a long-time Mac user - I think it should work without that checked.
3) Yeah, this kinda sucks. Each application usually has a way to switch between its windows, so for example you can Cmd-Tab to Mozilla then Cmd-1 between browser windows, but this varies between apps (most common are Cmd-~ or Cmd-left/right arrow keys or Cmd-numbers; Mozilla uses Cmd-number to switch between components and Cmd-1 alternates between browser windows).
4) All the shortcuts for menu items are plainly listed in the menus (although you may have to get used to the icons for Option and Shift keys). If you're looking for other things (like holding the Option key while opening a folder, as I mentioned above) Mac OS 9 had good help on this but OSX appears not to. Hopefully Panther will add better help (and a Help Viewer based on WebCore).
5) Try the View menu, which lists them all alphabetically.
6) The Mac has never had a maximize button; most people want to be able to work with several windows at once and see them on top of each other. The Zoom button is very nice for things like folder windows, since it will resize the window to fit the contents (this has been buggy in OSX, but getting better), but for other windows it may not be especially useful. Might be a hack somewhere...
7) And I want it to windowshade, which there is a shareware hack for. Hopefully Apple will address this in a future release.
8) Yes, the Terminal is slow. I'm not entirely sure why. It's even slower with transparency and antialiasing turned on. I haven't noticed bash to be slower than tcsh though; that seems pretty silly.
9) Hold Cmd-V for Verbose mode; it won't go faster but it'll give you something to look at.
10) Huh? You mean you want it to boot from CD by default? Fair enough, but sorry, it doesn't do that by default. You can select a CD in System Preferences/Startup Disk; I'm not sure if that sets it to boot from any CD by default or just that one. Hold the C key to boot from CD; in addition to being in the printed instructions that came with the computer, it's also usually printed on the CD itself.
11) I don't have a laptop so can't comment.
12) Wish I knew.
13) No idea what you're talking about; I've never needed to reinstall.
14) Because only advanced users from other platforms ask these questions?
15) No idea what you mean. Are you talking about broken aliases, or applications that don't work?
16) Originally because when you double-clicked a document, it would automatically "find" the application that created the document (no matter where it was), and launch that application. In 1984 this was very impressive. It's long overdue for a renaming.
17) Yes, but UNIX directories like etc and usr are hidden. When you open your main hard drive and you see folders called Applications, Library, System and Users, you're looking at the root directory with UNIX things hidden. You can either hack it to show them, or make symlinks to those directories (which won't be hidden), or press Cmd-Shift-G and type the path you want.
18) Software Update only updates Apple software; StuffIt Expander is made by Aladdin Systems and just happens to be bundled with the Mac OS. I wish Software Update were expanded to include third-party apps, and maybe someday it will be. I have no idea why it would crash; try asking Aladdin.
19) Huh? Desktop menu? Are you talking about icons on the Desktop? If so, uncheck them in Finder Preferences. If you're talking about the system-wide menu bar (as opposed to menu bars within windows), get used to it, it's
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