Learning UNIX for Mac OS X

Spencerian writes "I've become quite accustomed the depth of co-author Dave Taylor's writing on UNIX in previous books such as Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours . As you can note from Dave's recent writing credits, his experience and knowledge of UNIX is vast and varied. That said, I was mildly disappointed with this latest offering that discusses the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X." Spencerian explains the logic underlying that conclusion in his complete review, below.

Learning UNIX for Mac OS X
author	Dave Taylor & Jerry Peek
pages	139
publisher	O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.
rating	7.5
reviewer	Spencerian
ISBN	0596003420
summary	A good first-reference for new UNIX users, but steer clear if you're a UNIX vet.

For starters, I was annoyed to find that the book's title implied a larger format than the 139 pages it comprises. The book has an audience problem because of its size. UNIX guys like thick books. Is this book mostly for newbies to OS X, to UNIX, or to Mac OS X's implementation of UNIX? Despite this targeting problem, the book's contents are still useful, but I think its audience is more geared to new UNIX users. The book just doesn't have much depth for even a reference title, especially for a topic such as UNIX, and particularly for a new, little-documented UNIX family operating system such as OS X.

While Mac OS X is a BSD variant, it has a few idiosyncrasies that may throw off a veteran UNIX user, and this book manages to address most, if not all of these notable problems. For instance, Dave notes problems in sendmail that prevent it from working from the command line in Mac OS X's Terminal application, and presents a fix for the problem. If you use command lines in UNIX all the time, the book does present good instructions on getting Lynx, IRC, newsgroups, pine, and the like up and running in Terminal. The book shies away (quite appropriately) from any graphic interface items unless required, such as when changing Terminal's preferences.

This book was very recently published (May 2002) but already has fallen behind with the release of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Some components of Jaguar, such as CUPS support for stronger printing options, are completely missing from this book. If you have Jaguar installed on your computer, don't dive headlong into the NetInfo Manager steps for LPR printer configuration. Books typically don't age this fast, but in the case of this book, small changes seem to mean a lot to this title's usefulness -- the introduction of CUPS may have made Chapter 5's contents almost irrelevant.

Another small nag involves the lack of information on useful commands for Mac OS X users that weren't available (or were difficult to find) with the old Mac OS 9. One such command, cron, makes my life easier for handling some tasks on my home computer. It's not even mentioned in this book, nor will you find much information on shell scripting or compiling UNIX code you might happen to find. I guess I'm most annoyed at the lack of compile information since the Apple Developer Connection marked this book as a Recommended Title.

Despite our fondness for (and tolerance of the slightly-higher prices of) Macintosh computers, Mac users aren't made of money and don't like to buy a bookstore's worth of tomes for basic information. It would have made a lot of sense to talk more about compiling software since Apple's software or other GUI products don't meet or can configure all UNIX needs. And I won't even talk about the lack of coverage about XDarwin, an application that starts XFree86 within a Mac OS X installation, allowing X Window applications to run atop or in tandem with the OS X interface. XDarwin has become popular enough for it to become part of the stable XFree86 distribution. Given that not every UNIX user is a command-line freak, this is a pretty critical omission in my mind.

So, who should buy this book?

If you are completely new to UNIX and have been a gooey-kiddie who's used almost nothing except Mac OS 9, this is a very good reference to get your toes moist with UNIX. However, as drug dealers say, "the first taste is free." This book will leave you wanting more detailed information. More experienced UNIX users can probably find out what they need about Mac OS X's command line from a few free locations such as Mac OS X Hints.

One last thing: A pox upon Tim O'Reilly for not using the platypus for the animal on the book's cover. Given that the open-source core operating system of Mac OS X is named Darwin and has a nicely-modified take-off on the BSD mascot that depicts both the name of the OS and its BSD origins, I would think that O'Reilly would have jumped on this obvious cover.

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You can purchase Learning UNIX for Mac 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.

Re:OSX and Unix

[skwirl42]

Microsoft owns nowhere near 51% of Apple's shares. The shares they bought in 1996 were a) non-voting and b) maybe a percent, at the very most. Although I believe the shares have been converted to voting shares at this point, but still, incredibly far from being controlling shares. Not to say Microsoft still doesn't hold sway over Apple in some way.

Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

[CMU_Nort]

It sounds like the book he really wanted to get was O'Reilly's Mac OS X for Unix Geeks [oreilly.com]. It includes a lot of his gripe topics like:

* A quick overview of the Terminal application

* Understanding Open Directory (LDAP) and NetInfo

* Issues related to using the GNU C Compiler 9GCC

* Library linking and porting Unix software

* An overview of Mac OS X?s filesystem and startup processes

* Creating and installing packages using Fink

* Building the Darwin kernel

* Running X Windows on top of Mac OS X

Re:OSX and Unix

[imperator_mundi]

From yahoo finance [yahoo.com] => Institutional ownership: 59%

as long as Microsoft is not an institution is quite hard that it can own 51% of apple shares

Re:OSX and Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

It was August 1997, MSoft ponied up something like $168 million. Apple at that time was a $10 Billion (with a B) company - so that is less than 2%, and as the previous poster mentioned, it was non-voting stock anyway.

Reminds me of some of the truly moronic comments I got at the time. "So what are you gonna do now that Bill Gates has bought Mac?" Sheesh.

RTFM? 622 page maual

[goombah99]

I've been reading the 622 page admin guide. My first impression was "622 pages!!!! that is not why I bought an apple." After reading it two things are clear. First they are very gentle so even a unix weaking can understand both the big picture and the little picture. Second, it is not a unix manual,instead it focuses on using gui tools and a fixed, thought rather broad, set of tasks (e.g.setting up LDAP, mounting a disk). It still does not teach unix. A book teaching command line unix that specialized in mac's has stillnot been written (Yes I am aware of the various attempts). My third impression is that it needs a second edition. There are a lot of incompletely explained concepts that only an experienced NeXSTstep user would understand or descriptions that dont quite match the actual gui-tools. But it's wonderful to have a reference now.

Online UNIX tutorial for OS X

[phatvibez]

Here is a MacOS X UNIX tutorial I just found yesterday. If you're an old time Mac user or just want to learn some UNIX commands then this is something you might want to check out...

http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/ [osxfaq.com]

A Really Thick Book on OS X

[Melantha_Bacchae]

If you want a really, seriously, thick book on OS X (probably a bit dated post-Jaguar), try "OS X Unleashed". It covers both the Mac and Unix sides. The X Window System is covered, as is setting up a mail or ftp server, programming in Perl, using MySQL, even installing Lynx (if you want a text based browser).

It makes a great reference book, and comes in real handy whenever you need a heavy, if slightly soft, weight around the house. ;)

"Godzilla's coming"
Io, "Godzilla 2000" (US version dialog)
G Countdown: 26 days (www.godzillaoncube.com)

Re:OSX and Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

And YES, Darwin/Mac OS X *IS* Unix, as it has licensed the trademark from the Open Group, the rightful owner of the trademark.

Excuse me???

Mac OS X is not certified Unix by the Open Group. See their list of certified Unices [opengroup.org]. Notice the distinct lack of Mac OS X (and GNU Linux for that matter) in their lists.

--AC

The Open Group and Apple

[GPS Pilot]

Apple is on the Open Group's list of platform vendors that support the single UNIX specification [unix-systems.org].

The only thing unique about shell scripting OS X

[guttentag]

Is the audience.

Mac users will require more initial hand-holding to become comfortable with the command line. And they'll need instant gratification to convince them that dealing with such an apparently-archaic interface is worth the effort.

If you know someone who is in this situation, get them:

1. The latest version of BBEdit.
2. An easy-to-use shell scripting book as a reference. Reading a book like Teach Yourself Shell Programming from beginning to end is going to either bore them or scare them off. But as they are experimenting at their own pace and discovering just what they can do with shell scripting, they'll want a reference to thumb through for solutions to the problems they encounter.

Start them out with something simple and relatively familiar, like df, and explain what information it provides.

Then show them df | bbedit. They'll feel more comfortable seeing a connection between the GUI world they know.

Then shown them df | grep disk0s9 | bbedit.

And df | grep disk0s9 | awk '{print "Disk Size: " $2/2000 " MB"}'.

Work on basic one-liners first, then show them sed, head, tail, wc, etc. And when you go to show them something new one day and you discover that they wrote something on their own purely because they were interested, you know the fire has been lit.

And if they have any doubts about the value of shell scripting, show them the Linux version of my Buddy program [sourceforge.net], which is really just a collection of over 70 shell scripts (most of which are reasonably-well commented) and explain that the Mac OS X version is just the Linux version with an AppleScript Studio GUI slapped on top.

Speaking of 10.2

[d1taylor]

It wouldn't be a bad idea if those people who've read the book and have ideas about what should be added to the next edition (focused on 10.2 and, um, perhaps beyond) sent me a note about it!: taylor at intuitive dot com