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Title: Mac OS X in a Nutshell by Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek, Chris Stone ISBN: 0-596-00370-6 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Mac OS X in a Nutshell
Comment: The first ten things, I look up I found the answers I needed. This book gives the answer in a paragraph or two without getting too complicated. You are able to go back the computer and solve the problem. I think the hardest thing with is forgetting what we know before Unix. I try to explain why it works and the book has made that a lot easier. As Mac users, we got spoiled, because we could turn it on and it was self explanatory, but with OS X, you have to get started in the right direction. Apple has changed how things get done ever so slightly. There are dos and don'ts about the system as well as running OS9 with OS10. Installing applications and definitions of the strange new words Apple invents. There is printer instructions as well as pictures on those things you haven't a clue.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent book for technical OS X converts
Comment: It must be difficult when writing a book for 'power users' to decide what exactly needs to be put in and what can be safely left out. This volume does the job quite well, covering the simple stuff quickly and early while devoting a great deal of its 750 pages to topics of more interest to serious users of Apple's new(ish) operating system. It also declares its audience early, the preface devotes a page to explaining the target audience and states it is 'aimed at folks with a more technical bent than the average user--the power user.
The Gist
Mac OS X In A Nutshell is quite well structured, and organized into into 5 parts. The first is a quick overview of the Macintosh GUI. The second part, "System Configuration," is mainly devoted to getting the system running well (covering preferences, networking, the file system and Java). The third section, "System and Network Administration," is a good guide to several lower-level tasks, including an excellent chapter on directory services and NetInfo. The fourth is about development, including Apple's IDE "Project Builder" and CVS. The final part covers the Unix underpinnings of OS X and X Windows. This includes a Unix command reference of over 200 pages.
The Good
The book is also well written, with light, easily understood prose and some good screen dumps, tables and diagrams to make some of the more complex points easily understood. I appreciate the detailed contents section, good quality index and black chapter tabs at the side of each page for finding the information I need.
Everything seems to be covered, though you may sometimes find yourself needing to go elsewhere for more depth, but this is really only to expected in a book that is trying more for breadth across an entire operating system than depth in one particular area.
Despite having used and developed on a Mac for over 15 years and OS X since the late beta stage I still found myself discovering something new and useful every few pages in the book.
The Bad
The section of the book I appreciated least was the Unix Command Reference. 200 pages, most of which are adequately covered by the online man pages or a quick 'command --help'. Not that it isn't useful having this information on paper, and not that this section isn't more complete than the man pages and less error-ridden. It's just that my favourite operating system has a large number of commands that are hard to find by
name alone. Online, I tend to rely on apropos to find what I need. Back when you paid a large amount of money for a Unix license they came with hard copy manuals that included a permuted word index of the same top slug that apropos searches, which made them infinitely more useful. O'Reilly could improve the heck out of this book by giving us the same thing for what I felt was otherwise an almost totally wasted 200 pages (though I admit that the combination of the chapter on NetInfo and the command references for nicl and niutil etc. actually have me now understanding and using NetInfo well.)
Once again O'Reilly have provided a web page for the book that is mostly marketing material -- though in this case the Errata page is useful. At the bottom of the page they have a number of links to "Related O'Reilly Articles" but have only listed three by the authors of the book, leaving out, for example, X11 and Open Office on Mac OS X by Wei-Meng Lee and Configuring sendmail On Jaguar by James Duncan Davidson to name two MacDevCenter articles I've found incredibly helpful.
Conclusion
This book is not quite in the "must buy" category. If you do want a book to help you with the more technical aspects of OS X or to help you move to OS X from Unix or Windows hacking then this one is worth a serious look. It certainly better covers the technical aspects than OS X Bible and others of that style (such as the 'Missing Manual' or Robin Williams' 'Little Mac OS X Book'.) The only other volume that really compares is 'OS X Unleashed' and it has way too much coverage of the simple stuff and the various applications, is not as well structured and has a wordier, less terse and technical style. It's also more expensive and twice the size and weight.
Rating: 3
Summary: I was disappointed
Comment: Trying to nail a moving target like OS X is an ambitious undertaking and Mac OS X in a Nutshell falls short. Using many different styles and varying degrees of depth from one topic to the next, the book appears to have been rushed to print. However, even allowing the trade-offs between quality and currency doesn't explain why the book documents a snapshot of OS X 10.2 as it was in August 2002, although comments in the text say the time of writing was as recent as January 2003. Either it was completed in the few days just before MacWorld San Francisco or it was simply too late to include any references to the many significant developments presented by then. In any event, the book's timing is unfortunate as it appears dated and less relevant then if it were published four months earlier or a few weeks later. Having completed the book, I found myself with the same unanswered questions I had when I started it, and some new ones.
The book purports to target power users but I think they would find it too slow and shallow for the most part and, as a reference, too disorganized. A better audience would be newcomers to Mac OS X, particularly those who want to develop for the platform and need an overview of its capabilities. For that group the book serves as a reasonable starting point, however, readers should take care not to quote facts from the book without double-checking them; some outdated material, minor inaccuracies and vague wording will most likely land them on the losing sides of arguments.
More troubling than anything else about the book are the omissions. For example, there's no discussion of virtual memory nor the annoying havoc wrought when running out of disk space corrupts "Preference files" (and how these topics are related). In the "Dotfiles" section there is no mention of the most ubiquitous dotfile of them all -- .DS_Store. Things are brought up but not described. For instance, the Ruby language is listed numerous times along with Perl, Python and others but it's missing from the chapter that describes these programming languages and it's not even in the index. This is not to say the book must discuss Ruby but if it's going to refer to it multiple times then it needs to be addressed. These point out the problem areas -- information that's simply not covered, sections that cover a topic but miss key elements, and terms and concepts the text refers to but fails to discuss.
Even with the issues described above the book still contains a lot of useful information. I've picked up a couple new things and referred back to it on occasion. But the pay-off doesn't justify the reading effort. The book needs some serious editing work to smooth out the presentation consistency, better fact checking and an eye toward precision of wording. If this were turned into a true reference book O'Reilly could publish additional volumes such as Changes for OS X 10.3, Panther and bi-monthly mini-volumes that could refer back to the base volumes. That would be a useful collection.
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Title: Mac OS X Hacks by Rael Dornfest, Kevin Hemenway ISBN: 0596004605 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 24 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Mac OS X for Unix Geeks by Ernest E. Rothman, Brian Jepson ISBN: 0596003560 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue ISBN: 0596004508 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Learning Unix for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition by Dave Taylor, Brian Jepson ISBN: 0596004702 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 23 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Mac OS X Hints by Rob Griffiths, David Pogue ISBN: 0596004516 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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