May 21 2002
Teach Yourself MacOS X in 24 Hours
Can OS X be learned
in just 24 hours? I have become a believer that you can! If you have Unleashed you won’t even get through the first
half in 24 hours (it’s nearly 1500 pages). Interestingly enough, this book is
a slimmed down version of
Unleashed. It’s only 400 pages so it doesn’t have nearly the amount of detail
but it does well at what it aims. The way 24 hour books work is each chapter
is an "hour" and there are of course 24 chapters (or hours). It’s
actually feasible that a chapter can be covered in an hour. I actually read
through them much faster than that because I had just read Unleashed.
The book’s format is nice. It’s clean and is easy to learn from. Inside the
front cover is a list of commands that all X users should now. I found this
to be a good reference. If it wasn’t on the inside of the cover would have cut
it out 
.
The screen shots are well set up. A lot of them include graphics overlapped
on them to point out the important parts. All of the pictures have captions.
Clip art is used to emphasize important notes and tips. It’s very easy to find
your way around the book and in combonation with a great index it serves as
a great reference book,
I would have liked to see some color screen shots but none of the X books I
have seen have them so I wasn’t too disappointed. Aqua is beautiful – I’m
not sure why a publisher isn’t willing to pay the extra money for color. I think
it would be a hot seller!
Since it is a slimmed down version of Unleashed it has some technical stuff.
The difference is that in this book the technical topics aren’t discussed in
depth. Most of the "geeky" things talked about this book are merely
touched upon. It is enough however to wet your appetite – given that you
are a nerd.
The user level on
the back of the book (most computer books have a user level rating) is beginner.
I think this is fair. It serves as a good introduction to OS X. If you aren’t
a beginner I’d suggest looking at Unleashed.
Otherwise add this to your shopping cart!
The book retails for $24.99 but Amazon has it for $17.49.
You can’t beat that!
