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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.
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).
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????
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.