May 20 2002
MacOS X Unleashed
At first look
this book is a monster. It’s about 1500 pages, which was enough to put fear
into my heart even before opening the front cover. The Bible, War and Peace,
and most dictionaries are all shorter than this beast. It’s the largest book
in my library and as you’ll soon see – one of the best.
If you are a geek, reading this book will be more fun than opening Linux for
the first time. If you are just a regular user, you’ll learn a lot and quickly
transform into a Mac geek. A good 900 pages of Unleashed
are dedicated to the Unix underbelly of OS X called Darwin.
Don’t be scared upon skimming the index – the authors have a very good
way of explaining hard to understand concepts. You will be having so much fun
before long that you’ll forget that you’re learning Unix! A few days after purchasing
the book you will become best friends with the terminal and likely start spurting
out words like chmod and emacs at parties. It won’t bode well for your social
skills but it will get you at least $10 more an hour if you work with computers.
Here are some examples of the "geek factor" that make this book a
must have:
Chapter 29:
Creating a Mail Server
This chapter uses Sendmail
exclusively. It tells how to activate it, configure it and even allow your
email users to check their mail via a web mail interface. Even though it’s
a fairly complex topic, any Mac user could follow the directions even
without any prior Unix experience. The quality of instruction is truly wonderful.
Chapter 18: Advanced
Unix Shell Use: Configuration and Programming (Shell Scripting)
Do I even have to explain?
What Mac user isn’t a Shell scripting buff? For those that don’t know… I’ll
briefly explain. Shell scripting is a way of automating the powerful functions
that can be accomplished in the Terminal. For example, a shell script can
be written that automatically converts images to a different format (GIF to
PICT for instance) automatically upon their entrance to a certain folder.
Sound impossible? Well it is in the GUI but when you’re in the command line
anything’s possible!
Chapter 12: Introducing
the BSD Subsystem
In this chapter you meet
your new friend Darwin. It’s the text-only interface that we access via Terminal
that powers all of our applications. Basic operations like moving around the
file system are introduced but this chapter needs to be memorized for any
of the latter ones to make sense!
No other OS X book covers
the material that Unleashed does. If you have some of the others you will find
they contain for the most part basic stuff to get you up to speed in X. By up
to speed I mean, checking e-mail and other similar tasks. Not the low level
system stuff that Unleashed covers. But Unleashed covers all that the others
do – in the first 500 pages. It’s so big that it could well be
considered two books. One for Unix and one for basic OS X stuff.
If you are already a happy OS X user this book’s mass of knowledge will extend
your skills to a point that it’s scary. If you are a new convert from Windows
you will have to cover the books first 500 or so pages to get up to speed (they
cover basic OS X operations) but soon you’ll be shell scripting along with the
rest of us. If you are a Linux or Unix covert you’ll just be in love. If you
are a prior OS 9 user and are using X for the first time this may be a little
daunting but the first 500 pages should prepare you. An all around 5-star book!
The book retails for $49.99 but Amazon has it for $34.99
which is a steal for it’s enormous size! If you really want to extend your skill
set (or need a great reference book) this book is the one to get.
Once you get it don’t
forget to check out the website: http://www.macosxunleashed.com
where you can nab errata and file downloads.
