A hefty, 536-page book, the Mac OS X Power Hound/Panther edition is subtitled Teach Yourself New Tricks, and it is true to its advertising claims. Written for all OS X users, it is well-organized and well-indexed for review. In the words of author Rob Griffiths, it is "a vast table of hors d'oeuvres for your brain", not a book meant to be read sequentially. More than 650 hors d'oeuvres, to be more exact.

Navigation of resources is taken seriously by Griffiths. Page layout includes tabs, boxes, copious use of screen shots, numbering and bolding to increase the users ease in finding a specific bit of information. Reference to a website for all add-on software mentioned in the text is provided for downloadable access, just to extend the written word's benefits.

Sixteen chapters remind me of a college textbook: one could spend three hours in class plus a week of reading assignments to glean all the content of each section. Chapters start with 1: Designing Your World and builds to 16: Intermediate Unix Hints, with plenty in between. Griffiths zeroes in on browsing tips, beginning with a time saver useful when copying URLs to mail or textual documents, building the chapter with shortcuts such as using "F5" to refresh Web pages (a fourth technique for those who already use Refresh, Control R or the tool bar's stepwise commands), and documenting yet another way to download files with Internet Explorer.

While the coverage is slim concerning wireless, it does include remote access. Especially interesting is a tip for waking a sleeping Mac remotely. You have to know about Terminal for this and many other tips to work: it is an OS X application that "serves as the door to Mac OS X's Unix underbelly," as described by Griffiths.

I have disliked the X docking system since the day I first used it. It got in my way, and the bouncing animation of icons quickly moved from interesting to irritating as an effect. Using Terminal, these "features" can be altered. Alternatively, Griffiths describes TinkerTool, a free program that runs from Finder and allows a great deal of user control. Another option is Dock Detox, which eliminates the icons' heebie jeebies in all instances, including announcements of new mail and error message reports. If for no other reason, get this book to learn you can free up 13 MB by paring down your iPhoto languages!

The iTunes chapter will captivate the music lovers. The chapter devotes a full thirty pages to iTunes tweaking. It is here that Griffiths gently reminds us that the Help command is not to be overlooked. The keyboard short cuts for iTunes users is a gold mine.

Some may recognize the author's name: Griffiths is the wizard behind the curtain of www.macosxhints.com. Although you could get similar information from this site, saving a few dollars on the text's purchase, you would lose the utility of having everything in one place...with margins for personalized notes. I would get one for myself and the Mac buddies on my holiday gift list.

Yeah - I stole the subtitle to the book for the title of this review. However, it sums up the book quite well - why reinvent the wheel. =) The book is a user-friendly subset of the website macosxhints.com, which was created by the author. Despite being a small subset of hints, I like it better than the web site because you don't have to figure out what the correct search criteria are in order to come up with the hint you're looking for - just scan the table of contents. I'll wade through the website if I can't find what I'm looking for in the book.

As with anything, people like doing things different ways. Some people are into the keyboard shortcuts, some people use the mouse for everything, everybody else is somewhere in between. I appreciate that the hints dealing with the user interface give you various ways to complete the task.

Finally, to echo an earlier review, the hints dealing with the various web browsers are well worth reading. Among other things, it brought to my attention that your browsing history can not only be tracked by storing info in the cache or cookies, but by the favicon.ico files as well. Not that it really matters, but was an interesting (and smack-your-forehead-duh) hint.

This book is a collection of hints and tips for Mac OS X. It starts with the OS itself, then going into all of the standard applications. It finishes by covering some extensions that you can add to speed up your workflow. The coverage of each application is relatively light because the author expects that you are already familiar with the basics and are ready for some power user tips.

Illustrations are kept to a reasonable amount, usually one for every couple of pages, and they are used effectively. The text is a little too jovial for my taste. But it's not distracting and it's a matter of taste.

If a Macintosh is your primary work or play computer then you will probably find something in here to help you out. Whether it's worth the money or not depends on how much you find out, so I would take a look at this book in person, or at least browse the table of contents before you buy.

So the Pogue Press is expanding! This book offers to backup your knowledge of OS X and Apple's official documentation, the latter of which Griffiths clearly believes is inadequate. So he puts in tons of hacks that may come in handy.

You should pay attention to the section on browsing. IE and Apple's own Safari are discussed, along with remarks for any other browser that you might install. For most of us, browsing the net is now automatic. So Griffiths gives hints on how to use your browser. Capabilities that you might not have been aware of. Given the large amount of surfing that you do, a careful study of his tips might produce real productivity gains.

The only omission is a substantive discussion of using OS X with wireless networking. No mention at all of WiFi, and only a glancing comment on AirPort. I realise that these need external devices, and so might be considered somewhat outside the scope of a single Mac running OS X. But still wireless is so important nowadays, and Apple helped pioneer this for the mass market. Maybe another book in this series addresses the issue?