OS X Hacks

honestpuck writes "'Mac OS X Hacks' is a good grab bag of tips and techniques for getting the most from your Mac. While the tips are not as universally appealing (even among Mac owners) as those in 'Google Hacks' most people will find some value in the selection; experienced users may find it a little thin." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review. OS X Hacks author Rael Dornfest & Kevin Hemenway pages 380 publisher O'Reilly rating 7 - Good reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0596004605 summary Good grab bag of tips and techniques for getting the most from your Mac

The book is split into 9 chapters; 'Files', 'Startup", 'Multimedia and the iApps', 'The User Interface', 'Unix and the Terminal', 'Networking', 'Email', 'The Web' and 'Databases'.

For my money the last chapter is a complete waste of space since it only covers installing MySQL and PostgresSQL, and if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them. A number of the other tips would come close to that level, I feel their only use may be to encourage people who would otherwise stay away to make some use of the terminal and similar tools.

Over a dozen people have contributed 'hacks' to the book, among them some major geeks such as James Duncan Davidson (Tomcat author) and Jon Udell (well respected O'Reilly blogger.) This accounts for the wide number of areas covered by the hacks.

When I first started reviewing the book I would have complained about a large number of the tips being too application specific, too general or too low in skill level. Since then I've had a friend who wanted to edit a movie and we both found the chapter on iApps useful, one with a brand new Bluetooth phone who liked the couple of tips on Bluetooth and another who found the cross platform Windows-Mac stuff useful. so I have to say that while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later.

Overall the book is well written, well laid out and well cross-referenced and covers a wide range of information. My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material. Since you shouldn't really get this book until you are at least Mac proficient and probably own a basic Mac book or two then perhaps a tenth of the hundred tips will be covered in most Mac books and perhaps another five to ten you will have discovered on your own.

While O'Reilly doesn't offer a sample chapter of this book online they do have a page at Hacks that lists all the hacks and allows you to read eight of them. There is also a page in the catalog with the Table of Contents, Index and Errata.

Reading over my notes I feel split between raving about how good the book is - well written with a bunch of useful tips and tricks for any Mac user - and complaining about the useless nature of some of the tips. After taking another look at 'Google Hacks' and my review I realised where the conflict lies -- in my level of experience on the Mac. If you already feel comfortable with getting your hands dirty on your Mac then this book may well not satisfy you. If, on the other hand, you still have some trepidation about hacking at your OS X Macintosh then you'll probably love this book.

You can purchase OS X Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:mac problem

[w3weasel]

Please stop trolling with the same post.
You have posted this 'reply' verbatim in more than one article.
The Mac you are using is obsolete, the OS on it is obsolete, and the PCs you are comparing it to is obsolete
Have you been posting this reply since 1999 or what?

Re:mac problem

[SavoWood]

I saw this same post a few months ago. It might have even been just a paste of the previous time. When I first read this, I thought it was a Slashdot problem, but I'm not so sure.

Please quit posting this troll.

Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994

[(54)T-Dub]

And how is this brilliant user going to write code that utilizes said database?

Re:mac problem

[w3weasel]

What does M.A.C. stand for? and what is it?

Re:mac problem

[MacFreek]

M.A.C. = Media Access Control, a sublayer of the Datalink layer (layer 2) in the OSI protocol stack. It's main purpose is to take care that on a shared network, like ethernet, not two hosts start talking at the same time.

Apperently, the author is babbeling that anyone on an ethernet (M.A.C. Users) use old hardward (perhaps he would like everyone to use a 10Gb/s optical line?)

Other than that, I have no clue where he's talking about. Obviously it's off-topic since it is not Macintosh related :-)