Mac OS X (second edition) - The Missing Manual

• David Pogue
• Pogue Press
• 0596009410

Order (or just read more about) Mac OS X (second edition) - The Missing Manual  from Amazon.com

You do know that Mac OS X is Unix, right? I love telling Mac people this - so many of them still don't know.

I also love that Apple has gone in this direction. It's wonderful, because it opens up whole new worlds for Unix folk. It also helps the Linux software market and vice versa: if you write software for one, a port to the other should certainly be a lot easier than a port to Windows.

As I write this, I'm trying to win an OS X compatible Mac on E-Bay. My intent is to add Mac to my repertoire, and toward that end I bought this book.

(I gave up on buying used - couldn't find what I wanted, so I finally broke down and ordered an ibook.)

I am of course not yet experienced enough to make a complete judgement of this book's value. I do have a little Mac experience from the early 90's, but I'm more than weak there. So I really appreciated that the author expects that some of his audience will have no Mac background at all. Throughout the book, it's evident that he has that in mind, and there is even a whole appendix devoted to people switching from Windows. Well, that's not exactly my thing either, but I still found it helpful.

Of course it is difficult for someone so intimately familiar with Macs to avoid knowledge assumptions entirely. There are a few places here and there that make reference to things you just wouldn't know about if you have never seen a Mac at all. Still, I suspect that someone with even less Mac exposure than I have would not get completely confused.

The Unix related chapters are accurate and reasonable. There's not much of anything really geekish, but I really didn't expect that from this sort of book.

In general, the book is written well, with a light hearted style and enough humor to keep it from ever being dull. I suspect that this will be by my side constantly as I start exploring this wonderful new world of Apple operating systems.

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