March 14, 2004

A must-have book for mid-level and advanced Mac users

Good computer books are hard to come by, but I have just finished reading one that is exceptionally good. Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks by Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman (ISBN 0596006071) is complete without being padded, and is full of information that any Mac user who is familiar with Unix systems will find helpful. It covers everything from day-to-day maintenance to program development. Check out the table of contents: there's lots there.

One really nice feature is that they talk at length about non-Apple freeware and shareware packages that are useful to Unixy Mac users, showing where they have features that the Apple-supplied packages lack. The coverage of the Fink package system is in enough depth to make any Linux or BSD fan happy. There is also an appendix with 'man' pages for dozens of undocumented OS X commands.

You don't need to be a Unix geek to get value out of the book. Advanced OS X users who have never touched other Unix systems will still find lots of good stuff here that won't appear in other books (or, if it is there, is glossed over and not put in context). Even if you just want to know some of the geekier parts of OS X (like what happens when the system starts up, or how to use XWindows), this book will serve you well. Posted by lookit at March 14, 2004 01:05 PM