The book is a little on the expensive side, but it's well worth it. Of all the OS X books I've picked up over the years this was the most straightforward and clear. I would consider it an introductory to intermediate book for those who are just learning how to navigate their Mac via the terminal. The author's explanations of what a bash profile is and how to create cron jobs are the first such explanations of these topics that have ever made sense to me. I had encountered tutorials online that have attempted to do the same thing, but they were never as direct and thorough as the advice in this book. It was great fun to learn the topics and put my education to use on my own Macs. My only complaints were a couple of editing errors that would be obvious enough if one is paying attention. Other than that, this is a fantastic book; worthy of your money.

Many years ago I bought a second hand Ford Cortina in dubious condition. I kept it running with the assistance of a marvelous volume purchased at a specialist bookstore that was referred to as "the shop manual." It wasn't much help teaching you how to drive or how to park but if you needed to know how to perform an oil change, flush the radiator or bleed the brakes it told you all the details. Now James Duncan Davidson has given me a shop manual for Macintosh OS X Panther.

This volume assumes you know how to use your Mac, how to perform all the routine changes that are easily accomplished with the GUI. Davidson also assumes you don't want to know how to get a movie running as your desktop, or get an Exposé blob floating on the screen or any of the usual sort of 'hacks' or 'hints.' What he gives is a good guide to lifting the hood and performing serious mechanical work or tweaking the performance of your Mac with enough background information so that you can feel confident taking your own steps.

It was good after a few near misses to read an O'Reilly book that was once again well written, well edited, tight and crammed full of information pitched at just the right level. Davidson has done an excellent job with this book.

Davidson starts with a little history, and from the viewpoint he presents, this is not a waste of space; he spends his time explaining exactly how we arrived at the current version of the Mac OS.

Then we have a chapter titled "Lay of the Land" that explores the file system, including both the Finder view and the view you get from the command line. It also explains the four file system domains and the 'Library' directory. The third chapter is a quick (20 pages) look at the Terminal and shell.

Then we get 'Part II: Essentials,' which is the 120-page core of the book. This starts off, logically, with system startup and the login (and log out and shutdown). This is followed by short chapters on users and groups, files and permissions, monitoring, scheduling and preferences and defaults before a marvelous long chapter on the file system. Davidson goes into great detail and closely covers each of the topics, making sure that you get all the details not just 'recipes.'

Part III ("Advanced Topics") starts with a chapter on Open Directory that I found particularly useful. It includes coverage on Kerberos and single sign-on that explains it well, as well as the command-line Open Directory tools. The chapter on printing could have had a bit more guts. It covers the obvious but leaves out such joys as CUPS apart from a half-page sidebar; since sharing printers has caused me more than a little grief I would have appreciated more detail here. The final chapter on networking is better, and provides more useful detail.

It must be said that this section concentrates more on user level detail and leaves out real information on server level software and options. Given the target group for this book, and that a book has to draw a line somewhere, this is quite fair.

Davidson has picked his topics well, almost everyone will find all of Part II useful and educational. Part III is perfect for people wanting to run Panther in a corporate environment. He has balanced the command line and GUI well, pointing out where you can do a job with both and explaining the details.

I would recommend this book to any Panther user with a moderate amount of experience. It is not for the newcomer to the Mac, perhaps, but everyone else will benefit from this book.

This book is supposed to fall in some middle ground between a Mac OSX manual (Like Pogue's Missing Manual on OSX) and the hard core extreme Mac-OSX-as-another-Unix-system (as typified in Mac OSX Unleashed or the OSX Nutshell handbook or the under-rated Unx for Mac OSX by Enzer). However, I think it just ends up neither fish nor fowl. Not really a Mac OSX manual because it is much too short for that, and not nearly as detailed as other books that get into much more depth on the Unix aspects of OSX. I would suggest getting the OSX Missing Manual (or Robin Williams OSX book) and then supplementing that with Enzer's book or Mac OSX unleashed.

This book is not for geeks. If you are already someone who understands Mac OS X inside and out, uses the terminal to accomplish things periodically, and know how to get things done you will find this book to have no new information.

As I paged through my newly purchased copy I was quite disappointed at the lack of anything that was new to me. As such, this book will be passed on to one of my more advanced users who will enjoy learning more. For someone technically minded who wishes they knew how to do more with OSX, this is a pretty good book.

This book is well written and helpful, but geeks like me are not its audience. If you want a book that digs a lot deeper and covers a lot more subjects, pick up Mac OS X Unleashed (I bought mine from amazon, I know they carry it).

Joel

This is a work for those who don't mind getting into the Terminal and into the internals of their Apple. The book has an interesting mix of coverage of the GUI and then the corresponding Unix layer. This dual coverage brings the topics covered home quite nicely. Some of the topics covered are; the Terminal, process control, file access, startup handling, printing and networking.

I consider this the most accessible of the recent crop of O'Reilly OS X books on Panther. If you are a reasonably skilled end-user or engineering looking to get under the covers of your Apple this is probably your best bet.