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Mastering Mac OS X (2nd Ed.)
Mastering Mac OS X falls firmly in the middle. Unlike IAN it spends a fair amount of time on the GUI and a major section is devoted to QuickTime and the iApps. Unlike Robin William's volume it covers high end topics such as AppleScript and the terminal and has a good section on troubleshooting. One thing lacking that I applaud is that it does not have IAN's large chapter summing up Unix commands.
The GoodThe book is well structured, divided into 7 sections, 5 of increasing complexity, 'The Mac OS X Basics', 'On The Internet', 'Multimedia: Images Sound, Video', 'Networking, Coonectivity and Portables' and 'Advanced Mac OS X topics' - which covers AppleScript, the Terminal, and various servers including QuickTime, Samba and Sendmail. These are followed by a hardware and troubleshooting section and finally the appendices. The index is good and it has the by now traditional two level table of contents, the first listing just the chapter heads and the second listing all the sub sections as well.
Given that structure, the book touches all the bases and covers all the required topics well.
The writing is not bad, I think a stronger hand with the editing would have done wonders as it tends to the wordy.
The BadOnce again a certain amount of the early stuff is either below the needs of the target audience or not really required. Oh, and Sybex do have a page for the book which includes a Table of Contents, sample chapter, index and errata but get a load of that URL and the author has a web page for the book but he hasn't touched it in over a year, since before this second edition was published.
ConclusionIt should be said that among all the books in this genre none are badly written, or badly structured. Personally I don't like the style of the 'Dummies' books and so I put it at the bottom of my list but others may not have the same feeling. That said, how do you choose among them? The choice boils down to two things, how close you are to the target audience for a particular book and how well it addresses the target audience. Mastering Mac OS X is targeted at "intermediate beginners (those who have some experience with a graphical operating system) and solidly intermediate to advanced users" according to the Introduction. I think that it covers the needs of the first group well but will probably fall short if you are already an "advanced user." For these people I'd recommend Mac OS X In A Nutshell. If you are a total newbie, then I'd recommend Robin William's Mac OS X Book.
You can purchase Mastering 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.
Other than talking about the the titles of the chapters, where was the review of the content? Was this it: "Given that structure, the book touches all the bases and covers all the required topics well." ?
Random is the New Order.
I'm still looking for h4xx0ring OSX: The guide to 0wnz0ring your mac...and everyone else's. :)
:P
Serious, I've been a FreeBSD admin for quite some time now, and I use OSX on all my desktops, and have deployed 2 xserves in the last year. There is quite simply a LARGE void in server documentation for this OS, along with configuration how-tos.
I still can't get ndc (name daemon control, bind) to work on OSX, though named runs just fine. I had to write up docs myself (posted at macosxhints.com) on how to partition out the system and have Apple's updates work nicely and how to get SpamAssassin Milter working with a custom rebuild of sendmail.
Much much much documents need to be written for the rest of us....those who know what we're doing, but don't want to spend weeks researching in order to do it, which is what I'm STILL doing.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I'm currently working on getting chrooted ssh shell sessions set up for my users. I've looked at doing scponly http://www.sublimation.org/scponly/ But that only works for those not wanting 'real' shell accounts.
:)
Anyone with experience on the topic I'd like to talk to so I can document it and submit it back to the community for searchability and useability. Kthx!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I learned MacOS X by first having a general knowledge of OS 9. Now, OS X is very different from OS 9, but i had some idea of how things should work.
I went on to learn some Unix/Linux commands in late highschool when my teacher/LAN Administrator told the school he was switching the whole school to Linux to help the budget, and because M$ was bothing him. So I began learning the basic commands there.
I furthered my study of the command line and the kernel (That sounded like the title to a book, or should be.) by tinkering around with my Dad's gift to me, a NeXT Turbo Color station. It had been fried by a lightning storm, and so was useless. My Dad, however, just told me that he couldn't get it to run, and I could try if I like. I had been tinkering with rebuilding PCs as early as 11 years old, and so had a vague idea of how to open it. I decided, that as it IS kinda rare, I'd let it rest in peace for a few years.
When I turned 15 I moved in with my mom, who lives in Iowa (BORING). I found motivation in my lack of ability to be entertained by those mundane corn fields, so I began tinkering with the NeXT for the first time. I completely dissasembled it and reassembled it. It worked...for some reason. So it booted into a very strange command line (for someone who had only seen command lines in the movies) and i had to figure it out.
Make a long ass story a little bit shorter, I some how figured out how to get it to boot off its SCSI drive and i got some action. A lesson in FTP and PING and TELNET were just around the corner (I told my computer teacher that I had a NeXT, and he didn't believe me. He dared me to bring it to school, and we got it on the net.) and I learned there that the internet was more than just www.blahblahblah.com.
Sorry to make this post so long...but those two factors (Former knowledge of OS 9 and Unix commands and NeXT interface design)...ok...3 factors helped me to weed my way through OS X.
Done
I got nothin'.
Does anybody else here worry about the fact that we don't know the first thing about the author of this review? Is he/she an employee of Sybex? Of Apple? Does he/she stand to gain financially from the type of exposure which only Slashdot can give to technical books?
I dunno about you, but there are a suspiciously large number of highly-rated reviews here on Slashdot. I think we're all being taken for a ride sometimes.
I don't see any mastering in the book. Do I miss anything?
Less is more !
To get into the gritty Unix stuff, you can also pick up Mac OS X for Unix Geeks.
;)
This is an AWESOME book. Having been a Solaris/Linux admin for many years, this was the book that provided the real *click*, "so THAT'S how that works in OSX!" that made me feel like "root" again.
$0.02 (CDN)
One of the better books on OS X that I've found is "Mac OS X Unleashed" by John Ray and William C. Ray. It covers the new GUI based features and apps in OSX such as iPhoto and iTune, but the best part is that over half the book is dedicated to using the terminal. It covers the quirks in OS X/Darwin compared to other UNIX-like systems. Best used as a reference manual, but if you want to read all 1500 pages you are welcome to it.
(I don't have a link to Amazon, but send me money if you like it.)
Yeah... except that OS X doesn't behave like other UNIX. Want to set up NFS? You're looking at editing some funky database to do it. Want to know which options to use in netinfo for more than a really basic setup? Good luck finding a manpage on that in OS X. The man pages in that OS seriously lack. Just one example of many. Passwords, groups, hosts? Yeah... intuitive.
was several years before it was released, Apple insiders were suggesting that we learn Linux. They said it will help us with the new Mac OS. They also said that if Apple gets killed by MS, we would have a non MS alternative.
So when I got my first taste of OSX, I went straight to the terminal and typed top. It's all been gravy since then.
I like O'Reilly's Learning UNIX for Mac OS X. Advanced OSX is cool too if you like Peachpit press.
Nothing beats experience, except Edy's Chocolate Fudge Sundae.
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