Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (Second Edition)

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 It was published in October 2002, so it's not quite up to the minute, but it's certainly not outdated yet.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.

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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.

Sounds good

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!

Don't mince words, do you?

I hope the book is longer than your review...

Transition

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).

Mac OS X spreads evolutionist propaganda!

For a good laugh, check out this [crossspot.net] link.

The truth...

If the manual is missing, it is because nobody need a manual in order to use MacOSX !

So this is the story!

I've been missing one of my Mac OS manuals for over a week! Give it back O'Reilly!

good

review

An "intensely thorough" reference book?

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...)

Open books

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.

This is a great reason to have open books that can be updated. The problems with printing said open books are obvious, but for simple reference purposes, this is an idea whose time has come. I think there was a story here recently about O'Reilly doing something like this. Good luck to them -- I am personally much more likely to buy/use a book that I know will have a longer shelf life than a head of lettuce.

GF.

The "nudge nudge wink wink" factor

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.

No offense, but...

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.

Missing Manual For Dummies :-)

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 Microsoft Way.

modeled my own training on it

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!

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.

Best OSX Unix book...

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!

Shameless offtopic namedropping

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

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.

OS X books written for FreeBSD users?

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.

Re:OS X books written for FreeBSD users?

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

Not a good resource

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.

Mac OS X: TMM: The Missing Review Info

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.

Or get it with OS X

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.

When can we expect...

MacOS Y: The missing Operating System?

Scott

Painful reminder that OS X is not ready

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.

David Pogue better get ready...

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.

Get OS X Unleased 2nd Edition instead

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 my book are still relevant and I'm sure the 2nd edition will have the updated stuff. (Apple switched from wget to curl at one point)
If you're interested in OS X and using a mouse is a known thing, I'd think this book will help you more to get the BSD core. It includes chapters on Apache (including the webDAV and MP3 mods), sendmail, FTP and more very useful things.

Helped me switch

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 few bits and pieces that aren't immediately obvious and some tricks / shortcuts that I wouldn't have thought to look for without knowing they were there.

From the way it's presented, I imagine it's aimed at people coming from pre-OS X Macs, but it's still pretty useful for Mac virgins. (Or at least for me!)

Regards,
Tim.

Easy...

To give small minded people like you something to bitch about instead of the normal gripes of trying to figure out the config file for XFree86. It is the marvelous design of the Mac OS that requires only one mouse button to utilize the system. Also have you ever tried to do telephone tech support?

"Mam, I need you to click the right mouse button."

"I am using the RIGHT mouse button!!!"

"No mam, the one of the right side of the left mouse button!"

"Well, why didn't say that in the first place?!?!?"

(Sounds of a tech banging his head on his monitor)

Geek-friendly O/S, End user mouse?

I can believe the argument that some might put forward that the single-button mouse is easier for the novice user. This O/S is significantly advanced that is is attracting geeks (myself included, even though it is a dog on my G3). Geeks need buttons on a mouse. Why doesn't Apple even have the option of a multi-buttoned mouse? Scroll wheels have proven INVALUABLE by end users. Apple considers them frivolous? Eccentric? Confusing to the end user?

Bah!

Oh... and I am well-aware that most after-market USB mice work on Macs, but why does Apple not even recognize this issue?

-Pete

More like ID10T problems

Well, flame me if you'd like, but I fail to see why anyone would write a comment about an old 300 MHz Mac running OS < X in a story pertaining to OS X.

Your comment is 100% offtopic, is a troll, and flamebait. Nice try.

To address your argument though. Yes, OS X has issues when you overload it with too many extensions just like a Windows machine does. Considering the OS < X architecture is really a hack on a hack on a hack of a not very well designed API from 1984 then I suppose it's pretty amazing that it works at all. NOTE: Win32 is actually in the same boat. The API is a hack on a hack on a hack of a poorly designed API from the 80s (Win16).

I'm sure if you knew as much about Mac OS as you did about Windows (and spent all of that time on Mac OS instead of Windows) then you'd surely know how to fix the problem you're having (disable unneeded extensions). Of course, I never was an OS < X user and even I know to do something as simple as that.

Re:Too easy to use to need another manual...

<sarcasm>You're right, of course! Telling OS X to use an external LDAP server for login authentication is as simple as clicking "Use external LDAP" in the control center.</sarcasm>

There's still a lot that more advanced users might want to do that's not currently as simple as clicking a checkbox in some obvious place. This book might be nice for those situations.

Re:Mac problems

Would it be rude for me to tell you to get a life? This EXACT spiel has been posted before, months ago...

I really shouldn't even be justifying this with a response, but if you're telling the truth, you've got some problems with your Mac. I could supply you with similar anecdotes about my experience with painfully slow PCs, but i won't bore you anymore.

Re:Mac problems

I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

This is on OS 8/9, right? Reminds me of the good old times. As I recall, the base RAM requirements for a moderate number of extensions/control panets used up about 20Mb in those days. File coying operations cached the file in RAM if possible, so there's another 17Mb gone. Netscape is also memory hungry... and here comes the old VM system, grinding things to a halt. And if that doesn't do it, that cooperative multitasking will (you know, the one that intelligently stops EVERYTHING if you hold you click-and-hold in, say, the menubar?).

My point here is that the Mac OS, pre-OSX, was not very inneficient. I'm not surprised by what you're describing. And that 300MHz processor is not even a G3. What are you expecting?

You wanted reasons to choose a Mac? OS X. On modern hardware. I've always swore by Macs, but in retrospective, I honestly can't believe I put up with so much grief before OS X came along.

Re:Fist Prost

that is the most disturbing thing i've ever seen in my life. is it possible to mod this user down to -2 ?

Re: Mac program UIs

That's what I'd say is my biggest reason for not going near Macs.
Aside the speed problems I have noticed on evry Mac I've used (and yea, maybe I'm running a fairly fast PC, and can get it to run cleanly (I had a celeron 300 oc'd to 400Mhz for a few years that ran as well as most of my friends Ghz machines, it was only with games as recent as GTA3 that I had no choice but to upgrade if I wanted to play)) but the UI for all the Mac programs seriously puts me off.
Programs like BBEdit, just do not compare to Textpad [textpad.com] which has all the options I want, and listen to most of the options it's users would like. It's front end is simple, and clean, and nice, whereas the UI for every Mac program I have ever used, just feels clunky, slow and nasty. Almost plasticy, just like XP (though OK, not nearly as painful).

I agree that in OSX is by far the best Mac OS yet, but I still feel, personally, that the Mac has too many letdowns for me to use seriously.
I have approached using a G4 for music purposes, or graphic design, but at every turn I have found a way to use a PC to do the same, faster and better, and that allows me to stick with a system that runs faster and more like the way I want.

Re:Mac problems

I dislike Macs as they are nigh on impossible to use.

For starters: The maximise button does not work. Want an app to fill the screen? Tough, you cant. At best you'll get a highly annoying 10px margin all around the window, at worst it will go into some completely unwanted portrait-orientation that can even leave you with less of an app window size than you had before.

Similarly, the application's menubar is ALWAYS at the top of the screen. Right at the very top. You have to go out of the application, to go to it's menubar! Where's the sense in that?

Their keyboards and mice are utterly horrible to use, but they can be replaced so that's a short term problem.

Want me to use a Mac? Make MacOS user friendly then. All this guff about it being THE user-friendly OS applies only in the days when the alternative was command-line DOS.

Re:Mac problems

For starters: The maximise button does not work. Want an app to fill the screen? Tough, you cant. At best you'll get a highly annoying 10px margin all around the window, at worst it will go into some completely unwanted portrait-orientation that can even leave you with less of an app window size than you had before.

This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the "maximize" button, which in MacOSX is NOT a "maximize" but a "zoom" button. It switches between the default and the user-resized sizes of the window. In specific situations (such as the Finder) it resizes the window so the most content is displayed WITHOUT HOGGING THE WHOLE SCREEN. Why you would want to waste valuable screen real estate on blank space in a "maximized" window is beyond me...

Similarly, the application's menubar is ALWAYS at the top of the screen. Right at the very top. You have to go out of the application, to go to it's menubar! Where's the sense in that?

There is a fundamental tenet of interface design that says that targets on edges of the screen are "bigger", that is, quicker to reach than targets at some random location in the screen space. It is faster to reach a menu for a relevant app that is along the top of the screen than if it is off in the middle somewhere, even if the top of the screen is farther from the cursor.

Another reason for having one menubar at the top is so there is only one application's menus visible at the same time. This eliminates screen clutter and user confusion - you don't have to think about which menu to go to. Again, more efficient.

Their keyboards and mice are utterly horrible to use, but they can be replaced so that's a short term problem.

This is purely personal preference. The Apple pro keyboard and mouse are some of the nicest I've used. The older, condensed keyboard has it's problems, but types really well. As you said, any old USB kb/mouse will work if you need more buttons or some other form of keyboard.

Not to feed a troll, but these things are the way they are for a reason, and actually serve to make the UI MORE useable.

Re:Mac problems

but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Cuz their 'l33t'

Re:Hey Pogue...

Now THAT is funny....