Learning UNIX for Mac OS X 163
| 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.
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.
forgot something... (Score:2, Interesting)
the oreilly 'gotta get something published' model? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm seen this example with this book and with things like Rob Flickenger's 'community wireless networks'.
It's not at all that they AREN'T good books, or not informative, but they are, indeed, lean and seem to be something just to get published.
After all, we now have OSX: the missing manual (second edition coming soon) and other OSX manuals (which I can't name cause it aint out yet) that are more of the OReilly 'tome' size (400 + pages)
I am not a publisher and I really dont know how the publishing business really works, but as an end user and a buyer of dozens of Oreilly books, this 100 page short book thing seems to be a way to get a book, ANY book, to the market ASAFP while larger tomes are worked on.
$.02
Re:OSX and Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus! What kinda smoke have you been inhaling?
MS bought 150M $ USD worth of NON-voting shares of Apple back in 1996. That's peanuts. Apple was worth net 2.1 billion at that time.
That's nowhere near 51%.
Besides, you're factually wrong to start with. BSD was a set of tools that sat on top of AT&T's Unix. It eventually grew so large it required only a few files to become it's own OS. That was the kernel. They eventually got that.
Mac OS X (or, Darwin, actually) is entirely FreeBSD (some tidbits of NetBSD too), except for the microkernel, which is Mach (no relation to "Mac").
And YES, Darwin/Mac OS X *IS* Unix, as it has licensed the trademark from the Open Group, the rightful owner of the trademark.
What makes a Unix is not the kernel. It's how the package operates and how well is follows the standards (such as but not limited to Posix). The Unix trademark is awarded upon proper registration and evaluation of the OS. There are costst involved, is is pretty much the only thing that keeps Linux being called a real Unix.
Not familiar with O'Reilly books? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, O'Reilly already used a platypus for "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL", so no dice there.
However, I just got an idea to somehow play off of the BSD Daemon/Apple connection by using a picture of the story of the devil offering Eve fruit from the tree of knowledge. Also sort of a connection to Darwin via the evolution/creationism debate.
OK, so it's a pretty big stretch ;-)
Re:Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I was baffled about why you didn't think the title made this very clear. O'Reilly "Learning" books are for beginners (in some sense), and the title of this one is "Learning Unix for Mac OS X". What is the intended audience? Beginners. What will they learn? Unix, in the context of Mac OS X. Believe me, there are thousands of those people around, including many who don't usually buy many computer books and therefore have not come to expect the "brick of verbosity" tomes that some people really seem to want.
Having said that, I have to confess that I fell into a similar trap back in the day with "Learning Perl/Tk". Now there's an O'Reilly book that earned something approaching scorn in the geek community, and the reason why is because that one really didn't have much of the audience intended (beginners wanting to learn Perl/Tk), but instead was the only real book for *anybody* to buy that really talked about Perl/Tk...and most of the actual buyers were complete geeks in search of something that would augment the then sparse-ish documentation for the toolkit. But all's well that ends well; we now have "Mastering Perl/Tk", and I think we're all happy again. :-)
Me too. I'm guessing that this book if it turns out to be as good as we'd hope will sell a *lot* more copies than you might expect given the rate of adoption by geeks of (T)iBooks. When I went to YAPC in St. Louis, i was floored by the number of those being used during talks...
Re:RTFM? 622 page maual (Score:3, Interesting)
I want a very in-depth guide, or set of guides, similar to the old Inside Macintosh series, but for MacOS X Server admin. So what if it covers Unix topics, or GUI topics? Cover it all and break it down into modules that you can buy and read as you want. Have an intro book for general topics, have a book on mail, a book on web serving, a book on firewalls and NAT, etc. I'm sure Netinfo and LDAP will take a book just by themselves.
The point is that these introductory Mac books just don't cut it any more. They are all pretty much clones of each other and they tell you simple stuff like how to set up your web browser. That's great for the home user, but it does nothing for the professional system administrator looking to use Macs.
Re:Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Score:2, Interesting)
Right, but that surely is a mark of success with a Learning title? As the lead author, I look at it this way: I want to prepare the reader for their future journeys into Unix. Jerry and I did our best to ensure that we explain potentially foreign Unix concepts clearly, enlighten readers on the philosophy of command lines, flags, pipes, redirection, and other weird Unixisms that are a long way from Mac OS 9 / Windows interaction, and generally push everyone in the right direction so that they (you) can learn more and shed the book!
I'm quite delighted to read your comment, Spencerian, actually. I wish that all my readers came back a year later and said "thanks for getting me started. I don't need your book any more!" :-)