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Running Mac OS X Panther
This volume assumes you know how to use your Mac, how to perform all the routine changes that are easily accomplished with the GUI. Davidson also assumes you don't want to know how to get a movie running as your desktop, or get an Exposé blob floating on the screen or any of the usual sort of 'hacks' or 'hints.' What he gives is a good guide to lifting the hood and performing serious mechanical work or tweaking the performance of your Mac with enough background information so that you can feel confident taking your own steps.
It was good after a few near misses to read an O'Reilly book that was once again well written, well edited, tight and crammed full of information pitched at just the right level. Davidson has done an excellent job with this book.
Davidson starts with a little history, and from the viewpoint he presents, this is not a waste of space; he spends his time explaining exactly how we arrived at the current version of the Mac OS.
Then we have a chapter titled "Lay of the Land" that explores the file system, including both the Finder view and the view you get from the command line. It also explains the four file system domains and the 'Library' directory. The third chapter is a quick (20 pages) look at the Terminal and shell.
Then we get 'Part II: Essentials,' which is the 120-page core of the book. This starts off, logically, with system startup and the login (and log out and shutdown). This is followed by short chapters on users and groups, files and permissions, monitoring, scheduling and preferences and defaults before a marvelous long chapter on the file system. Davidson goes into great detail and closely covers each of the topics, making sure that you get all the details not just 'recipes.'
Part III ("Advanced Topics") starts with a chapter on Open Directory that I found particularly useful. It includes coverage on Kerberos and single sign-on that explains it well, as well as the command-line Open Directory tools. The chapter on printing could have had a bit more guts. It covers the obvious but leaves out such joys as CUPS apart from a half-page sidebar; since sharing printers has caused me more than a little grief I would have appreciated more detail here. The final chapter on networking is better, and provides more useful detail.
It must be said that this section concentrates more on user level detail and leaves out real information on server level software and options. Given the target group for this book, and that a book has to draw a line somewhere, this is quite fair.
Davidson has picked his topics well, almost everyone will find all of Part II useful and educational. Part III is perfect for people wanting to run Panther in a corporate environment. He has balanced the command line and GUI well, pointing out where you can do a job with both and explaining the details.
Oreilly's page for the book has a table of contents and index but no example chapter. If you go to Davidson's page at O'Reilly there is a link to a short excerpt on scheduling tasks as well as several earlier articles Davidson has written for MacDevCenter.
I would recommend this book to any Panther user with a moderate amount of experience. It is not for the newcomer to the Mac, perhaps, but everyone else will benefit from this book.
You can purchase Running Mac OS X Panther from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page
"How about $200, then?" The mortician debated with himself, then said, "All right, you've got a deal, but keep it quiet, okay?" Locking the doors and pulling the drapes, he went hurriedly to work, scalpel in hand.
In minutes, he was holding the dripping pussy at arm's length, and he asked nervously, "How do you want it wrapped?" "Don't sweat it," the old guy said. "I'll eat it here."
It's just too bad it runs on such limited, underpowered, overpriced hardware.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac OS X Panther (a G5 w/1 Gig 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, Safari 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 G5 machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
And then change it again, once you've logged a dozen hours or so, and you realize all that candy sweetness is there to keep you from noticing how it's mostly unix with a sham thrown over it.
Actually, I am Jon Katz. I can't stop myself from the need to furiously masturbate as all you greasy fat nerds read my reviews. You see, that's my fetish - greasy hot man love while reading reviews of computer books. Slashdot is the only web site on earth where this is even possible.
Sincerely,
(dis)honestpuck
Hmmm..
Fuck you?
Do you think OSX is easier to use than Windows? Why?
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
"Switch" to REAL hardware you homo
That's the info we, typical Mac users, need! From Kareem Jabad, hairdresser, to Father John O'Connor, S.J., we, the normal Mac users, need all the tips on being gay we can find. All of us like to think we are gay enough, but we are always in doubt: will Timmy, the neighbour's 10-year-old boy leave us for the first antique dealer who happens to be even more gay than us?
Paying a lot for something shitty makes you feel like you've been screwed, right? Well, surprise, surprise, Mac users LOVE being screwed in the ass! (With no lubricant, perhaps just a little bit of sand, to make it more painful...)