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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.
BOYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
anyone in the slashdot audiance would need this kind of book. OS X is intuitive enough, most would benefit from Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (which even then is a very quick skim).
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
5 million years apart and we still fling our poo at eachother...
I think i see how we're 99.4% alike...
I thought SCO owned MacOS...
But I have karma to burn.
Am I the only person who sees a new slashdot story coming up, gets mildly excited only to see a review about a book, about something I have absolutely no intrest in.
I'm at work, which I will attempt to use as my excuse to why I would be so excited, and conversely so disappointed, but wow.
I'll just go back and read more about SCO.
http://use.perl.org
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.
Master Baiting (so i'll know how to post flamebait, you cock nibblers)
Unlike Robin William's volume
THE Robin William uses OS X! Woah! I'm impressed!
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Nanu nanu!
Did I miss the review? Didn't learn anything that a swift glance at the back cover in a bookshop wouldn't have told me.
C- - Must do better.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
David Pouge's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual is a well-respected book for showing both converts from OS 9 and the Unix/Windows world how things are done in OS X.
To get into the gritty Unix stuff, you can also pick up Mac OS X for Unix Geeks.
The combination of these two books might better server you rather than one "everything and the kitchen sink" Mac OS X book.
Colocated Linux Servers - From $60/mo
Contents:
Unpacking your Macintosh
Turning on Your Macintosh OSX Computer
Changing Your Work Environment
What is this "Unix" under the hood?
Using the Console
The Root User
r00tly c0n50l3 usage
0wnx0r1ng j00r fr13nd'5 05X b0x0r5!
Trolling is a art,
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).
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 28, @12:00PM
honestpuck writes "I've seen a fair number of books for OS X and they range in target audience from the raw beginner such as Mac OS X for Dummies and Robin William's Mac OS X Book through to those for technical readers such as Mac OS X In A Nutshell (IAN)." Read on for honestpucks' review of the new edition of Todd Stauffer's Mastering OS X.
Mastering Mac OS X (2nd Ed.)
author Todd Stauffer
pages 804
publisher Sybex
rating 7
reviewer Tony Williams
ISBN 0782141188
summary Good guide to OS X for intermediate beginners to intermediate users
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 Good
The 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 Bad
Once 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.
Conclusion
It 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.
These books always end up being stupid. They only tell you something you will be able to learn in 5 mins just by going through the OS. The only thing I would recommend is look at the pictures, and skim through it. These books are never helpful.
I'd recommend this book to MS people who only play solitaire on there top of the line computer.
Book has good points and bad points. Reviewer prefers other books.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
this was too lite to be called a review (in my opinion). Personally I felt that Mac OS X: The Missing Manual was a good entry to mid-level book. my two cents.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
This reads more like a review of a review. Seriously, Slashdot, just because someone writes something claiming to be a review of a book that you may want to push doesn't mean it's post-worthy.
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
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).
what is mac os x? does it support linux?
The real why to master Mac OS X is to use macosxhints.com and google.com
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
*See the FIRST POST
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'.
Cause it is, shitheel.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
i'd rather just buy a powerbook and bring that wheever i g0
cuz he is
rm -rf
apt-get install finger
Mod this book +5, Redundant.
You mean the Cult Of Oran's Rugged Ass has got books now? Amazon, here I come!
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.
right here, here, here, here,
I don't see any mastering in the book. Do I miss anything?
Less is more !
And here I thought he was only a comedian/actor...
I know I know *groan*
Half the fun of owning a mac is maintaining a defeatist attitude b/c no one makes enough software ports and all the features/bugs in the platform are undocumented easter-eggs. That software problem has been mostly stamped out. Now, if someone filled the documentation void, what would I do with all my angst????
I can master OS X in 804 pages but it takes 1200 pages to master XP. XP better get a whole lot less complicated or switch to a smaller font quickly.
TMM plus OSX for Unix Geeks, both from O'Reilly, have served me well.
mt
A quick look at the reviewer's web site and a glance at Sybex's internal contacts documents shows no obvious link. He didn't write the book and he hasn't done any work for Sybex in that last few years.
:)
Is he related to somebody at Sybex? Who knows?
Is he dating somebody at Sybex? I have no idea; I don't get the good gossip at work.
Me? I work for Sybex. I'm the Director of Information Services. I have little to do with book creation, but I wouldn't mind if you bought a couple of our books.
Cocoa Programming is a very detailed book about the Cocoa environment. It gives you a very in-depth look into Apple's technology and even pulls you into the design philosophies behind Cocoa and Mac OS X. An excellent read.
One of the best source for OS X help/info/tricks remains MUGs: Macintosh User Groups... :-)
Better than any book I know, and won't be outdated
Animoog.org
why isn't this story showing up at apple.slashdot.org? This happens often on slashdot. Whenever an apple story shows up on the front page of slashdot, it often does not show up at apple.slashdot.org. What gives?
You can't here from Ork with dead reckoning alone. He had to have some computer experience.
I always suspected it, but now we know it's true! Where are my mod points when I need them?
Listen to that karma sizzle as it burns!
Please! If anybody has mod points, mod this parent down.
And please! If anybody is in the same room with the parent poster, smack him!
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.)
The combination of these two books might better server you rather than one "everything and the kitchen sink" Mac OS X book.
Hang on to your pennies. It would seem that Running MacOS X, a book for MacOS X power users in the vein of Running Linux, is in development right now.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
check it out
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.
photosMy Photostream
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.
OSX Unleashed is a great book, with the power to turn Mac GUI victims into power users. It covers very nicely the basics in Unix, the Next heritage, and advanced Mac geekness in general. It was the only book that explained what could be achieved with Netinfo (One of the Authors appeared to be a Next veteran). It is also very well written and quite entertaining for a technical book.
Okay, I come to slashdot to learn about 'real' unix, not some kind of bastardized, I have to pay for it, shit. Christ... and the 'review' sucked too. Who taught this moron to write. Seems to me he got on his Mac and fired up some crappy word processor with an oversized, over-energetic thesarus and just threw together some random, useless thoughts. I am with the poster below, I would rather have a giant GoatSeX dude painted on my bedroom ceiling than waste my time with a Mac, or this review. Yesh.
What you are seeing is the result of overhype. You will not see an acceptable level of documentation for OSX because we do not have proper access. I dislike Apple. Im putting that much too mildly. Why is it all the artsy, self proclaimed "computer geeks" go for apple and then complain they are not allowed hard core access to such a closed operating system? They wll never realise that they are being bent over the lime/aqua/tangerine colored barrel, hoping for apple to reform their ways. Grab the KY boys and girls! here comes another outdated chunk of hardware for you to complain about!
While the book explains how to use the applications, tweak the interface, and fix common problems, it doesnt seem to dive under the hood of osx.
I want to see books about the disk/file structures, program directories and resources, processes, configuration files, etc.
You know how Windowmaker works, this is how AQUA Works.
You know how BlahFS works, this is how HFS+ works. (And how UFS works under OSX)
How the control panel controls the configuration files.
Using LSOF to trace iTunes sockets/ports/file handlers.
How to recreate boot sectors on HFS+ if you mess it up with loading YellowDog linux. (Openprom boot techniques.)
A real OSX Hackers book.
search on Apple's site for a document named "Understanding Netinfo"
Agreed again. This is the best all around OS X book, for beginner through moderately advanced to even advanced users.
I recently had to give a technical training for supporting MacOS X and MacOS 9 to seasoned Windows administrators. Two of them also had Solaris experience. My problems were "where to start" and "what book to offer".
See, they had ample experience with the other OS, but none with MacOS special niceties. I did not want to bore them with the otherwise excellent Missing Manual series, since these cover mostly user apps. I needed a book that briefly touches the Mac user experience, Finder, windows, menus etc. and then quickly moves on to more advanced subjects. Account configuration, networking, servers, scripting. Also, I didn't want a humongous 1000+ pages book.
Needless to say, I could not find such a book. In the end I settled for "Mac OS X Version 10.2 Jaguar Little Black Book" by Steinberg. It covers some basics and moves on to system admin tasks. Every chapter has a troubleshooting section. Also the book has a mere 560 pages and is well written.
By the way, the Windows people enjoyed the MacOS X training & experience very much. But I doubt that the one day training made them into Macintosh service engineers & troubleshooters.