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OS X Hacks
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.
The reviewer writes "if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them."
And people wonder why geeks don't have more non-geek friends.
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http://www.macosxhints.com/ rocks for searching, and if you're unclear on the concept, you can post a query and get an answer from someone in the know. Ad free, and on a decently fast server too. Highly recommended if you want to save a tree.
Yes, just open Terminal.app and type sudo justbuyadamnusbtwobuttonmouse -dumbass.
I realize you're probably trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt just in case. If we were talking about older MacOS, you'd be right - it was about as interesting to your average geek as Windows 3.
But the latest version, Mac OS X, isn't your grandfather's Mac. It still runs all the old Mac apps, but under the hood it's UNIX. The fact that it's the only UNIX in town that can run Photoshop, MS Office, etc. is driving "real" technical people towards it - in droves.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
"if you can't figure out how to install [MySQL/PostgresSQL] then you aren't smart enough to use them"
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later."
Uhm, no shit? I need only to look at my personal library of O'Reilly books and/or API manuals to know that 99% of the information contained therein is absolutely fucking useless to me *right now*, but I'm certainly going to need them. That's why I bought the books, instead of going to the library to take notes.
"My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material."
Why should the author of the book expect the purchasers of his work to own the complete works of his (many) competitors? Can't the book stand on its own merit? Where is your analysis of this possibility?
The gripes presented have absolutely no credibility, and this whole "review" seems to be based on the premise of stating the painfully obvious.
Note: I'm an OS X user.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
That's what hack _always_ meant. A hacker has always been another word for coder. The media started using "hacker" where they should have been using "cracker" or "computer vandal" or similar (mostly because, I'm guessing, in the beginning you had to be a hacker to break into a system) and now the negative version of the term has stuck.
;-)
I'm a hacker, proud of it, and may you people who keep thinking that means I break into computers all get beaten with wet noodles.
I'm still waiting for the OS X Hack that will allow me to read and write to a UDF-formatted CD-R. You know, the kind that Direct CD and Windows XP create that allows you to treat a CD-R/CD-RW as a big floppy disc.
Despite OS X having a mount_udf command, it seems that it doesn't support these types of discs yet.
How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device
Indirectly answering the question:
Whether or not you consider the choice by Apple to continue using single-button mice is reasonable, for those who consider it wrong, note that "too few buttons on the mouse" is not a complaint that can only be aimed at the MacOS.
From the perspective of a traditional UNIX workstation user, Windows has too few buttons - they (e.g. Sun Microsystems Sparc-based machines) ship with 3-button mice. It is true you can get 3- (or however-many) button mice for x86 machines, but then (a) that's a "nonstandard" variation already since the "standard"/baseline for Windows is 2, and (b) you can do so for the Mac too.
This is why if you look at (and those who program GUI apps should know this already) the mouse event/action classes in Java, there are more than 2 defined mouse "button-actions", that if the physical hardware does not exist (i.e. only two-button mice are on the machine) the same effect is achieved with modifier keys (Opt/Alt-click, Ctrl-click, or whatnot).