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Apple Books Media Businesses Book Reviews

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition) 164

Posted by timothy from the who-moved-my-manual dept.
emmastory writes "I finally (finally) picked up Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. I've been meaning to grab it since I first heard that David Pogue wrote a book on OS X; I've been a fan of his for a while. I remember reading his stuff in Macworld -- on System 7, even -- when someone gave me a subscription (many) years ago, and his New York Times columns have generally been pretty good as well." Update: 03/25 16:43 GMT by T : Ha! The original headline was missing OS X's "X" -- now in place. Read on ...
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition)
author David Pogue
pages 712
publisher O'Reilly and Associates/Pogue Press
rating An excellent book that merits its title.
reviewer Emma Story
ISBN 0596004508
summary An intensely thorough look at using OS X, updated to include Jaguar.

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual is exactly what you'd expect if you've read any of Pogue's other books or columns: it's clear and straightforward without seeming dumbed down. His writing tends to be fairly light and often funny, making for particularly readable technical books. That's not to say it's without substance, though -- within the first chunk of this book (which is pushing six hundred pages) I'd already had a dozen of my existing questions answered as well as plenty I hadn't even thought to wonder about.

It seems pretty definitely directed at people who've been using Mac OS for a long time and are switching to OS X. Given what OS X is, it's not surprising that it takes some getting used to, despite vaguely looking like Mac OS. If you've never used OS 8 or 9 and don't have any existing Mac habits to unlearn, you might not even need a book like this -- but I suspect it would still be pretty useful. Pogue also takes time to address issues people might have switching to OS X from Unix or Windows, but the focus is on comparisons to older versions of Mac OS. As the title implies, Apple documentation tends to be slim to non-existent, and this is by far the most thorough OS X book I've seen yet. It functions exactly as promised -- I keep my copy on the shelf over my desk, and when I have a question about something I remember from OS 9 or why something I know from BSD doesn't work under 10.2, I can just look it up.

The second edition is more of the same -- the book is bigger, fatter, and covers Jaguar. It was published in October 2002, so it's not quite up to the minute, but it's certainly not outdated yet. I shelled out another twenty bucks when I first saw it, and I don't regret it -- the only major complaint I'd had about the first edition was that its usefulness was somewhat impaired when 10.2 came out. It's possible I'll feel the same way about the second edition when faced with 10.3 -- but maybe Pogue will write another book.

I would recommend this book for just about every OS X user, regardless of how recently you switched -- people who installed it back during the public beta will probably get just as much out of the second edition as those who just bought their first-ever Mac. However, you'll probably find it more useful if you're coming from older versions of Mac OS than if you've just switched from another Unix or Windows, but that's not to say it isn't worth reading in those cases. It's relatively cheap for an O'Reilly book (712 pages, list price is $29.95) so you can't really go wrong.

You can purchase OS X: The Missing Manual from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition) More

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition)

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  • After reading his review I think this might be a great book for me to start off learning the mac with. Nice Review. The book seams to be a great price too!
    • IMHO this book is best for people who have used mac before and some computer experience. If you are very good with computers, MacOSX in a Nutshell is much better. It is a very thourough book and I learn something new every day reading it.

      For those people you know who have never used a compter before, get them a Mac and Robin Williams' Mac OS 10.2 book. It starts off with the absolute basics of working with the mouse and moving windows around, all the way up through some pretty thourogh system information f

      • IMHO this book is best for people who have used mac before and some computer experience.

        So how about us experienced computer users that have recently switched to a Mac?

        I have the Missing Manual 2nd edition reviewed here, and while it is a good book, it's still written for an experienced Mac user. I bought it as the best of bad alternatives, while searching for a book that didn't spend 20 pages explaining the concept of a file system and double-clicking ("Mac OS X for Dummies" etc.) or jump straight in

        • Re:Sounds good (Score:2, Informative)

          by pogueman ( 661574 )

          IOW, I need a book called The Definitive OS X Manual For The Recent Switcher With Copious Experience In Every Other OS In Existence. Any recommendations?

          The closest thing is probably my own, just released book "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual." Which might also be called, "The Definitive Mac OS X Manual for the Person who Already Knows Windows (and wants to bring over all the email, addresses, buddy lists, favorites, etc., and learn the keystrokes of the Mac OS)." --Pogue

  • Don't mince words, do you? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dylan2000 ( 592069 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:04PM (#5591415) Homepage
    I hope the book is longer than your review...

  • Transition (Score:3)

    by Lynn Benfield ( 649615 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:05PM (#5591424)
    Given what OS X is, it's not surprising that it takes some getting used to, despite vaguely looking like Mac OS.

    It's gotten a lot better, but the best description I've heard of Mac OS X DPs/10.0 was "it's kind of like a Mac, but a Mac built by people who've only had a Mac described to them over the phone".

    There were a number of really quite spurious changes to the UI initially, which probably explains the demand for this kind of book - the change from 9 to X has been more confusing than any OS transition Apple users have ever had to do before, including the move to System 7 (when there was also plenty of grousing to start with).
    • It's gotten a lot better, but the best description I've heard of Mac OS X DPs/10.0 was "it's kind of like a Mac, but a Mac built by people who've only had a Mac described to them over the phone".

      I thought that was called 'Microsoft Windows'. :-P

      • Andy Hertzfeld used to describe it as the Macintosh hit by the bizarro ray [mackido.com].
        (although I thought he made that quote about the Atari ST, not Windows. Its a good enough analogy, that maybe he re-used it.)
    • Oh, don't get me started on System 7. What a hog that was.... I mean, they wanted you to have 4 megs of RAM. Four whole megs! Suddenly, you couldn't opt to run with the finder, or the multi-finder, they forced being able to run multiple applications at the same time on you!

      Oh...and aliasing...big deal, I had that in 6.0.4
      from some shareware system extension. [hey, wait a minute....isn't this that point when they sprung that foul 'balloon help' on us? Oh, yeah, 350k of extra crap in the system folder..
    • but the best description I've heard..

      call it: "unix, the musical"

  • Mac OS X spreads evolutionist propaganda! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For a good laugh, check out this [crossspot.net] link.
    • That was the funniest thing I have read in a month!!! Well, wait, they are allowed to vote.... :(

    • Hah.. I've seen that before

      I'm still hoping that it's a really bad joke. :-(

      Sadly, there are certainly people who will believe this crap. Even worse (as a sibling post has mentioned) these people can vote.

    • From an Addendum to the linked article:
      "ADDENDUM III (4/20/2002): Another reader (it has been busy today!) has informed me of another link between Apple and the forces of darkness that my initial research missed. Apparently the Darwin OS is not the original creation of Apple Computers but is instead based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork (pictured right). This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensivel
    • I've been a Mac user since 1991. I'm also a creationist and a Christian. I've read this site before. While I would never deny there is a pro-evolutionist slant in the world today, I hardly think that the Mac is a satanic platform. People like this, while no-doubt well-intentioned, sound so ridiculous that they water-down legitimate points of contention. This allows evolutionists to discount valid arguments, pointing to ludicrous web sites like this as reasons to distrust the lot of us. Very sad.
      • I apologize, because I'm pretty sure this is an off-topic post. However, I hope it's at least educational.

        Science and religion are mutually exclusive. Science attempts to describe how things work, not debate why they are here. Evolution is not a religion nor an attempt to refute religion, just a description of a biological process over generations of a species.

        Evolution can't be a religion. Religion is the belief (or non-belief) in the nature of existence and the great question of "Why are we here?" (a
    • It's official; Creationists confirm: *BSD is dying

      One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when Objective: Christian Ministries confirmed [crossspot.net] that *BSD is satanic propaganda, part of a larger campaign by powerful & evil subversive forces such as PBS and Pokemon. Coming on the heels of recent evidence which plainly shows that *BSD is the work of the Devil [helixcode.com], this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD and it's evil ilk is collapsing in complete disarray, a

  • The truth... (Score:3, Funny)

    by borgdows ( 599861 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:06PM (#5591430)
    If the manual is missing, it is because nobody need a manual in order to use MacOSX !
    • Or in your case, a grammar checker.

      ;)

    • This book is good for learning all of the bare necessities of how to use MacOS X. I haven't read the whole thing (sort of stopped reading it last fall), but some of the kinds of tidbits it offers IIRC:

      • Hold down command-option and click an app's Dock icon to hide all other running apps.
      • Holding down the command key while clicking and dragging a window behind the frontmost window lets you manipulate that window without making it the frontmost window. (I have even dragged hyperlinks from Safari into my RSS

  • So this is the story! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Linux-based-robots ( 660980 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:09PM (#5591456) Journal
    I've been missing one of my Mac OS manuals for over a week! Give it back O'Reilly!
  • review

  • An "intensely thorough" reference book? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:11PM (#5591483)
    My sister who works at one of the Apple stores recommends this title to people who need any manual at all. An awful lot of the people who buy it do so more for reassurance than anything else -- your nervous parents who want it around just in case, basically.

    She doesn't see tech-minded people buying how-to books for the OS proper, or at least not when they first buy the computers. Personally I've never felt a need, and my 9-year-old kids were comfortable immediately in OS X, tweaked every setting they had access to without a blink.

    (But "intensely thorough"? Is intensity really the quality you're looking for in a reference? I imagine cracking the binding in my haste to pore, hot-eyed, over some crucial command line syntax...)

    • Personally I've never felt a need, and my 9-year-old kids were comfortable immediately in OS X, tweaked every setting they had access to without a blink.

      That's _precisely_ the niche this book serves. I was comfortable in OS X, and tweaked everything I could see, but reading through the Missing Manual book turned up all sorts of features I would never have stumbled upon or actively researched.

      • I was comfortable in OS X, and tweaked everything I could see, but reading through the Missing Manual book turned up all sorts of features I would never have stumbled upon or actively researched.

        Exactly my experience re the book. I didn't need it to explain me the ins and outs of using sudo or ls, but the stuff on UI tweaking, aliases, networking etc. provided a few "I didn't know you could do that, too!" moments. The "Where'd It Go?" dictionary at the end was very useful for a Win-2-Mac switcher like m

    • ..."Insanely Great" and "Wicked Fast". The hype is comunicable. The OS rocks though.

      This "Ridiculously Brief" explanation was brought to you by the letter "A" and the number "9".
  • The second edition is more of the same -- the book is bigger, fatter, and covers Jaguar. It was published in October 2002, so it's not quite up to the minute, but it's certainly not outdated yet. I shelled out another twenty bucks when I first saw it, and I don't regret it -- the only major complaint I'd had about the first edition was that its usefulness was somewhat impaired when 10.2 came out. It's possible I'll feel the same way about the second edition when faced with 10.3 -- but maybe Pogue will write

  • The "nudge nudge wink wink" factor (Score:5, Informative)

    by dwvanstone ( 581420 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:13PM (#5591500)
    I've been reading the OS X Missing Manual for a month now, and I find myself frustrated by the author's writing style. There's a heavy flavor of Aren't-We-Mac-Users-So-Special and gleeful putdowns of Microsoft that turns me off. The information could have been presented more professionally and objectively.

    I did find it immediately useful to discover features I didn't know Mac OS X had, such as speech recognition. For that alone, I'm glad I received the book as a birthday gift.

    In contrast, I absolutely adored the iMovie Missing Manual. I devoured it over a few weeks and found it fun, useful, interesting, and without all the "nudge nudge wink wink"s.

    • I think David Pogue writes his book on Windows due to the speech recognition software available for it. He dictates his books to the machine since he has carpel tunnel or something.

      So, I'd say he is non-biased.
    • I agree. I do get tired of this kind of thing. Slashdot itself is one of the worst examples of it, however. Consider how /. stories have a smart-assed commentary that is almost always anti-Microsoft, pro-Linux and Mac-snickering (to coin a term). I guess it goes over big with the intended audience - both for Pogue and for the editors of /.
      • > Slashdot itself is one of the worst examples of it, however. Consider how /. stories have a smart-assed commentary that is almost always anti-Microsoft, pro-Linux and Mac-snickering (to coin a term).

        Yeah, but Microsoft does suck though.

      • It's a niche effect. Mac users are what, 5% of the user base? They can either feel like losers being left out, or like the elite. So they choose to feel like the elite.

        (A Mac user, though not at the office).

    • I am sick and tired of you people that treat Microsoft like some sort of poor disabled kid that we all need to be more sensitive to. Lighten the fuck up! These are *operating systems* people poke fun at other peoples OS's in good fun. Nobody took any of it seriously until your brigade of politically correct drones came in and made it some sort of jihad either for or against. Get over it, and while doing that, get over yourself.
      • The Jihads have always existed, at least back as far as 8-bit home machines.
      • you must be psychic. on top of your excellently sting commentary, have any of these clown shoes that bitch about /.'s lack of objectivity ever noticed that THIS IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE SITE!!! It is opinionated. In many cases to the extreme. I like it that way. I agree with a number of the opinions. If you don't then start your own damn site. Lord, these friggin high user number people get on my damn nerves. Why don't they just keep their opinions to themselves and be more objective?

    • There's a heavy flavor of Aren't-We-Mac-Users-So-Special and gleeful putdowns of Microsoft that turns me off.

      I'm not so sure why this is a big deal - I didn't notice this 'flavor' much, but perhaps that is because I've been reading Slashdot for years. All joking aside, though, I think this is indicative of the lighthearted nature of this book - which is its biggest strength, imo. The author loves the Mac, and isn't ashamed to show pride in the machine and the OS. But he also is very honest about the shor

    • For better or worse, that is David Pogue's style. He use to write like that for MacWorld, which is where I know his name from. People who buy this book already knowing him will expect that it contains his "jab here and there" style of writting. That's exactly what many Mac user want.

      Believe it or not, he has other books [bitworm.com] out as well which include Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual [bitworm.com]. The XP Home books seems to be a hit as well.

      -Pete

  • No offense, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TTop ( 160446 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:17PM (#5591530)
    This review told me practically nothing! What does this book have in it that is good for geeks?

    Okay, so it's been updated and it's fatter and you like it and it's good for people who used pre-OSX Macs. Personally, I never used a pre-OSX Mac -- why is it good for me?

    You describe it as a thorough book, but barely give me an idea of it's contents.

    • Thank for you review of the review. Well written, but a little on the short side. Next time, try to be a little more detailed about what the good and bad points of the review were. :-)

    • If you are a geek, look for the O'Reilly book that addresses the Geek.

      MacOSX For UNIX Geeks, O'Reilly Press.

      I have Learning UNIX For MacOSX. Pretty good reference.

      Peachpit Press has an OSX Advanced offering.
      So if you feel his review doesn't show your need for the book, hit your local bookstore and thumb through the offerings there. Go to the O'Reilly site and read about their OSX books. Their books are usually good, with a few exceptions.
      • The most useful book I have read is Mac OS X Unleashed, by Ray. Packed with useful information at an intermediate to advanced level. Has the best discussion of NetInfo I have found. Kelby's Mac OS X Killer Tips is also pretty good for icon surfing and exploring the UI.

        -ccm

    • This review told me practically nothing! What does this book have in it that is good for geeks?

      Based on my reading of the first edition, there isn't much geek stuff in this book. Readers are told how to open a terminal window, and given a very quick gloss of the unix command line.

      However, even geeks are likely to spend a significant amount of time working with the GUI, and the book covers a lot of fairly obscure features of OS X. A good bit of space is devoted to helping users of earlier Mac systems f

    • You ought to read the Nutshell book then. It's described by the author as being the geekier companion to the Missing Manual book.
  • I got this when I got my imac - since I'd only used Windows for personal computing, I wasn't used to doing things the Mac Way. Well, the OSX way - I guess there are differences. It's a great book, but weak on command line stuff and not all that funny. I don't know why people who write manuals bother trying to be funny: it's almost never pulled off and is usually distracting.

    I'd recommend it to anyone who is switching from Windows - Mac (OSX) stuff isn't intuitive if you're used to doing things One Microsof
  • I think Pogue is great. I and a colleague have been providing training/orientation for the university we work at since OS X appeared. As soon as Pogue's book hit the scene we grabbed it and began recommending it to our beginning and intermediate OS X session attendees. IN fact, we've now modeled our training sessions loosely around his first three chapters.

  • What's missing is a legacy-free manual! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lowy ( 91366 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:41PM (#5591678) Homepage
    I became a Mac user only after Apple moved to MacOS X - a modern, UNIX-based OS.

    I have neither the desire, the time, nor the inclination to learn anything about Mac OS 9, 8, or earlier versions. I avoided these for many years ( because they were unstable, unpreemptive, un-interoperable, and unneccessary for an ungraphic artist like myself.) and it is even less neccessary for me to learn them now that they are legacy.

    I love MacOS X. It gives me a great, pretty, powerful, easy-to-use environment that I don't have to think about 95% of the time, with the option of a CLI terminal/shell for those 5% of the times when I do. It would be fun to learn more about MacOS X, which is - as you know - a very very different OS than its predecessors.

    Won't someone write an indepth book on Mac OS X that doesn't contain uneccessary and often confusing references to obsolete virgins I know little (and care less) about.

    • Try the Mac OS X Unleashed book from SAMS. It is also written by Mac OS 9 users, but the authors have certainly embraced OS X (with a few gripes about springloaded folders and the like which actually do exist in Jaguar now). I assume the book has since been updated for Jaguar, so most likely this extra fluff will be gone.

    • ...that doesn't contain uneccessary and often confusing references to obsolete virgins I know little (and care less) about.

      You mean like, Little Women [upenn.edu]?
  • the best OSX Unix book is 'Unix for Mac OX' by Matisse Enzer, If you're looking to learn Unix on the macintosh. It covers everything from commands, pipes, environment, editors, permissions, scripts... it's very thorough.

    I probably wouldn't recommend it for people already comfortable with Unix, but for a beginner it's the best OSX Unix book I could find. Highly recommend it!
  • I've actually been to David Pogue's house, Twice. I knew their Nanny, and met him once. I really don't remember what was said, he did seem a little eccentric but nice. Anyway, I just remember watching "Fried Green Tomatoes" on their TV, (I had been outvoted.)

  • A better O'Reilly book in my opinion (Score:5, Informative)

    by ilsie ( 227381 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:54PM (#5591769)
    is Mac OS X in a Nutshell [amazon.com]. When I finally took the plunge and bought an iBook, one of the main reasons was for the bad-ass BSD core in OS X that I kept hearing about. Unfortunately, the official Apple documentation is extremely sparse, and coming from a heavy Windows background, OS X and Aqua were very foreign to me, and sort of intimidating.

    So I did some research, and began looking at good books to help me make the "switch". Although the Pogue book is well written and entertaining, there is really not much in there that I didn't figure out on my own in the first two days just playing around with the OS. There is absolutely nothing in there about the BSD core. OS X In A Nutshell, on the other hand, goes through the Aqua Interface, then goes in depth into AppleScripting, the BSD core, and even has little tidbits on Perl & regular expressions and the like. It doesen't wax poetic like the Pogue book, but it's definitely a much more concisely written, useful book for the /. crowd.

    • I agree! (Score:1, Informative)

      by macguiguru ( 608453 )
      The Pocket Guide is also great - just what you need when you're trying to remember a specific command. The nutshell book is superb in that it gives you the full tour and touches on all the portions of the OS that the average user AND the super-geeks will use. I also recommend it.
    • Nutshell is pretty good for just about everything. I have been looking for a good reference book that doesn't just cover "How to log in" and "intro to the dock" and finally come to the conclusion that I don't really need a book! (also thanks to safari bookshelf/google)

      I guess I could learn programming???
    • I had the same experience as you, though I had experience with earlier Macs. But there was nothing in OS X that caused me problems in my day-to-day use of my iBook. I got this 'Missing Manual' thinking it would help me understand some of the more obscure features I could use. It didn't. It showed me how to (sort of) use the various iApps--the important ones I had already figured out (iMail and iTunes), so that was worthless. The command line info was pretty sparse, but I really didn't need it since I a

  • OS X books written for FreeBSD users? (Score:3)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:17PM (#5591948)
    I have OS X on two boxes, one in the office and one at home, but I've been turned off by the hiding of the UNIX stuff. I use FreeBSD daily at work and at home and would like to get more out of OS X than I have so far, but it's been obfuscated beyond my willingness to dig.

    Any books that approach OS X from a BSD user's perspective? I don't care for the OS X GUI interface myself (wish I still had Finder...), but it might be fun to get more out of BSD side than I have.
    • You want Mac OS X for Unix Geeks [oreilly.com], by our good friends at O'Reilly. It's the only OS X book I have, and the only useful one I could find at the bookstore. It approaches the BSD side of OS X from a command line *nix perspective through mostly a series of short examples and descriptions of the system. It's not as thorough as I (and probably you) would like, but it's adequate to get you the terms that you'd need to type into Google. :)
    • Mac OS X Hacks [oreilly.com] might suite you better as it talks the Unix side more.

    • Re:OS X books written for FreeBSD users? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pribut ( 86272 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:13PM (#5592412) Journal
      First: Put a terminal window up on your task bar. Then it is no longer hidden and all the man pages, perl, vi, whatever you want is right there.

      Next check out the following books

      Learning Unix for Mac OS X
      by Dave Taylor, Jerry Peek

      Mac OS X in a Nutshell (already mentioned)
      by Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek (Contributor), Chris Stone (Contributor)

      and certainly the already mentioned

      Mac OSX for Unix Geeks - with no picures - just like a terminal window :-)

      That said - as a 2 week newbie on OSX - I found the OSX Missing Manual helpful to getting started. I have previous experience on WinBlow$, BSD Unix, and Linux. The transition was not hard - and part of the big sell is certainly the BSD Unix - and access to being able to install XWindows, and creating a similar environment to what is there on the other systems with KDE, Gnome and all the goodies that go with that.

      Mac OS X for Unix Geeks
      by Brian Jepson, Ernest E. Rothman
    • I was really disappointed for OSX for unix geeks. This book should be titled OS X for Unix newbies. I expected more of a cross-reference style approach: Here's how you do it in *nix Here's how you do it in OS X. What I got was some very basic Unix tutorials. My NextStep 0.8 documentation (circa '87) is MUCH more helpful than this book.
      • My gripe about these kinds of text exactly. I've been running x86 unices in a professional capacity (first Linux, now FreeBSD) since '97. I don't need a UNIX how-to book, but a cross-reference book that addresses OS X as a Unix OS as compared to its BSD brethren.

        I could, of course, just muddle through and figure stuff out, but I have less patience and free time than I used to.
      • What I got was some very basic Unix tutorials. My NextStep 0.8 documentation (circa '87) is MUCH more helpful than this book.

        While there is some pretty basic stuff about using the shell, I think this comment is a bit unfair. The stuff about fink and other package management, building packages, and the xnu kernel are not what I'd call "very basic." I liked the book not so much because it taught me anything new about Unix, but because it told me the things I needed to know about Darwin's quirks, like its d

  • Not a good resource (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DrRobert ( 179090 )
    This book has too little technical info for knowledgable mac and unix users and for newbies... well there are just better ways to do things than the book describes. I'd skip this one on all counts. I do find Pogue amusing at times though.
  • For actual info about what's in the book, take a look here:

    It has the table of contents, a sample chapter, and is the butt of a multi-tiered joke.
  • Just for fun, I wonder how fast a slashdot review drives up an auction for the book [ebay.com] with OS X thrown in. :)

    I'm opening a betting pool. My cash says it'll go for $30 plus the resulting moderation level of this post.

  • MacOS Y: The missing Operating System?

    Scott
  • My eMac decided to lose its hard drive for no particular reason. Held down the Option key on boot, and nothing showed up. Zapped the PRAM. Booted from an OS X CD, ran Disk Utility, found a minor issue, repaired it. Still couldn't boot.

    Booted from an OS 9 CD, opened the Startup Disk control panel, selected the System folder, rebooted, and everything is magically back to normal.

    Macs are usually painless and simple, but they do have their quirks. Mac OS 9 is built around these quirks. Mac OS X is not.
  • because there's a new release of OS X comming this summer, and I'm sure there will be a lot of changes that will require a new edition. It is an excellent book. BTW.
  • I was looking at several books to have as a reference last year (still on 10.1) and I decided I preferred J&W Ray's "OS X Unleased" over the Pogue book and Jesse Feiler's one. There's a second edition out now also covering Jaguar and I can find little wrong in the book. It seems to be written for the more advanced Mac user, since it seems to assume certain GUI actions are known. Its section on the BSD core however is excellent. Although Apple made some changes going from 10.1 to Jaguar, most things in m
  • I bought the first version of the Missing Manual when I was considering a Mac rather than a new PeeCee (for Linux, not Windows) just before Christmas. It was a really good introduction to the Mac way of doing things, and together with a couple of afternoons wasted on demo machines in PCWorld and a stray copy of MacWorld convinced me to switch. (At least for my primary desktop. The server boxen still have Linux on, although not all of them are x86, thank $deity!)

    It's been of a lot of use since for the fe

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