| I 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. _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 exisiting 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 that OS X contains nothing at all from the previous versons of the operating system 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. 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. Definitely recommended. |
| The "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" has finally become available and it is worth the wait. My experience with earlier publications was not good - I found them to be too basic and very incomplete (no surprise: writing a manual based upon the Public Beta has little relevance to the current high powered OS 10.1.2). Neither criticism applies to Pogue's new book. It is filled with all kinds of information that I found useful in evaluating Mac OS X. His style is to provide a number of ways to accomplish a task and let you pick the one(s) best suited to the way YOU work. If you are like me, many of those quick keyboard commands will be forgotten, but that's why I keep this type of book handy as a reference tool. Probably this book is best for developing 'Mac-experienced' users. The learning curve, for parts of the book, can be a bit steep. So new users may want to read something more basic before picking up this new publication. And serious power users don't need a manual. No CD-ROM with this book, but there should have been. Having the entire book as a .pdf file would be useful, especially for those using a Powerbook. |
| David Pogue is one of the best technical authors of our time, and once again he hits a homerun! I've been using Mac OS X as my primary operating system for the last month, and I've had absolutely no trouble learning Mac OS X in record time. It's such a great operating system... so elegant, so user-friendly, so intuitive, so crash-resistant. And so I wondered, "Okay... do I really need to purchase David Pogue's manual on Mac OS X? I mean, I have a really firm grasp on the OS to begin with!" And as I started reading the book, the answer became a resounding YES! Before I had even finished the first chapter, I had already learned dozens of new tips, tricks, secrets, explanations, and reasonings that I did not know! Stuff that I didn't REALIZE I wanted to know until I read them in Pogue's book. And as always, Pogue's breezy, friendly, & cheerful writing style makes this manual read like a gripping novel. You can read this from cover-to-cover without ever losing interest. This book is a must read. It should come bundled with every copy of Mac OS X. |
