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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.
I've heard many good things about the McIntosh recently, and my family and I decided we needed to buy a new computer to replace our old Windows machine. Having heard of its ease of use, we decided to go the McIntosh route. We recently purchased an 800 mHz G4, with OSX. We thought we were getting a good deal. But unfortunately things turned out quite different.
Upon putting together the system we discovered that our mouse appeared the be broken. Although it wasn't cracked or shattered, it only had one button. When I spoke with our McIntosh dealer, we were told that the upgrade to a real two-button mouse would require more money.
Apparently the mice with one button were only a "trial version" of the hardware. I feel that this is a very deceptive practice on Apple's part, and have written a letter to the Better Business Bureau to protest this. I felt as though I'd bought a car but to make it go past 35mph we'd have to pay more money!
Rather than pay the exhorbitant sum of money for a real mouse, I went to CompUSA and bought one out of my own pocket.
Strike one for McIntosh!
Secondly, one of the reasons that we went with McIntosh is because its new OS was based on the Linux kernel. Since my company uses Linux heavily (and its an OS I'm highly familiar with) I thought it would be nice to be able to run my work applications at home. Imagine my shock upon hearing that McIntosh was actually based on an incompatible fork of Linux - a fork known as BSD. Since our computers at work ran Linux - and not BSD - it was clear that I'd be unable to compile them on my Apple! Strike two for McIntosh.
The final straw came last night. I received an email from a friend alerting me to numerous holes in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When I went to MS' home page to download a patch, I was stunned to see this patch only applies to Windows machines!
Given the tiny user base of McIntosh, apparently software patches aren't made frequently - if at all - for McIntosh. I refuse to use an OS that is as ridden with holes as swiss cheese. Thus I'm going to be returning my McIntosh and purchasing a Windows XP box.
I hope this message reaches someone at McIntosh headquarters. Maybe their CEO, Steve Ballmer(?) will get this and fix their business practices. Until such changes are made, however, I fear that McIntosh will continue to be a bit player in the computer world.
stupid macheads.
go out, spend a zillion dollars on a machine that looks like a fisher price toy, and has an OS slower then molasses.
take it out of the box. play with it.
Figure out it does not more then XP or any other flavor of free *nix
suckers....
but it's all good since Steve Jobs is just so fuckin cool. Apple only makes great products.
fuckin hippie shit
what is mac os x? does it support linux?
that is so weird!!! fox news is the same way for me. i will be watching and stories that i have absolutely no interest in will show up again and again, all with promising headlines. it is so decieving.
as a mac user i notice that slashdot spends an awful lot of time talking about things that aren't mac related, especially games. everyone knows games don't work on the mac.
Mod this book +5, Redundant.
check it out
Why bother, Mac's simply suck. I would rather have a full size picture of GoatSex man on my desk than risk my livelyhood with a slow ass Mac.