I like easy to read book and I also had assumed that learning UNIX is not necessarily has to a struggle. This book stood up to my expectations almost perfectly. It does not overwhelm with technical details and does not press too much. I also followed someone's review advice and purchased Linux and UNIX for a beginner training suite, 4DVDs + 2CDs includes 4 Unix Academy Certifications ed.2008. These two nicely complement one another. You watch it and you read it. If you didn't catch it from the first try you watch it again and read it again. In two months I found myself confident to that extend that gave advises to our system administrator and he accepted them because there were subjects that he wasn't completely sure. I can't overstate how much I have learned from them. Don't be naive, though. You will have to learn and memorize many things. The fact of owning neither book nor DVD will not make you knowledgeable, but if you will work it trough, trust me, you will surprise many people around!

This book is a disjointed collection of largely irrelevant information. Here are some examples that reflect the general spirit of the book:

A quote from chapter 1, "Inside the terminal":
> iTerm's contextual menu consists of the following items: New Tab (which
> allows you to choose a session from the bookmarks), Browser (which opens
> the selected URL in your default web browser), Mail (which opens a
> compose mail window with the selected email address as the recipient),
> Copy, Paste, Save, Print, Print Selection, Select All, Clear Buffer, Close, and
> Configure.

You'd hope O'Reilly fired the editor.

Chapter 1 also teaches us how to use the backslash to escape spaces within filenames, and how to use escape sequences to set the title of the terminal window.

Chapter 2, "Startup", explains the OS X boot process. The impression I got from this chapter was that the authors don't understand said boot process and instead regurgitated a list of steps the computer goes through while booting. This chapter also teaches us how to use cron to schedule tasks.

Chapter 3, "Directory Services", gives us (of all things) example C code for retrieving a user's encrypted password, alongside information on managing users and their home directories.

It doesn't really get any better in the following chapters. If I was forced to say something positive about this book, I'd say that it touches many topics briefly to give you an idea of the things you can tinker with in OS X. [...] Or skip the part where you look at the table of contents -- I mean, you already know you can run X11 on OS X, right? So google for "os x x11", and you'll get much more comprehensive and concise information.

I think the book is a good source for the first things you need to know when turning to the Unix features of Mac OS X. It's kind of a collection of everything you would use valuable time to look for elsewere.

Having recently bought a Powerbook 17" I wanted to indeed bridge the UNIX and Windows world. How better to do that than going Apple? I've got MS programs, pretty GUI and, the best, based on UNIX. So... Going from FreeBSD to a Mac I needed a manual and this book does it best IMHO. It's has a plethora of links to open source and some shareware, howto's, links to more info and is fairly broad. It does presuppose a working knowledge of UNIX and is targeted to an audience who is switching from a Linux/BSD OS to a Mac. While the transition is somewhat seamless, the Apple folks did some things a bit differently and that's where this book can, and does, help. Anywho, enough rambling. It's a great little book/help and should be on a UNIX person's desktop if converting from, say, Linux/FreeBSD to a Mac.

I really enjoyed this book, it's a treasure trove of information throughout. Generally speaking Mac's goal is to keep things simple and the majority Mac user's are perfectly content with that. I would even say that most Mac users I've met don't care to learn UNIX. That's a shame, they don't know what they are missing! The only reason that I became interested in Mac is that it now has the power of a stable, mature and secure operating system, UNIX! Apple has the best of both worlds, the power of the UNIX OS and the beauty of the Mac interface.

With Mac's simple approach, sometimes it can be difficult to get techinical details. For a technical person, this book is welcome. But I wouldn't consider this book to be overly "geeky." Anyone with some experience with UNIX could find useful information in these pages. For example, did you know that you can use GIMP (a very powerful free image editor program) as your default image editor for iPhoto? You can use a lot of cool, free, open source software with Mac OS X. That's another good reason to learn alittle UNIX! This book goes into a lot of detail on how to install GNU free software and other packages.

The book is divided into 4 Parts: Part I. Getting Around, Part II. Building Applications Part III. Working with Packages Part IV. Serving and System Management. Then there's a lengthy Appendix on the file system, command line tools and missing manpages. In a nutshell the book starts with general information, then covers Networking and Programming topics. A good place to start is to find the Terminal Application in the Utilites folder and drag it to the Dock for quick access. I'm more of a network guy than a programmer, so naturally I gravitated to the networking chapters. But to tap into the full power of UNIX one must be able to edit and write some scripts too. This book has some practical scripting examples. It also touches on using your Mac OS X client as a server. I'm sure that I'll be refering back to this book, it's a good one to have in the library.