MAC OS X: THE MISSING MANUAL, 2nd Edition, by David Pogue.
Published by Pogue Press, O' Reilly Books, $29.95.
Reviewed by Avrum Lapin
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MAC OS X: THE MISSING MANUAL, 2nd Edition, by David Pogue.Published by Pogue Press, O' Reilly Books, $29.95. Reviewed by Avrum Lapin |
I am one of those who jumped from OS 9 to Jaguar in one step last August. I was shamed into making the move when I discovered that I was one of the two persons at our MUG meeting who wasn't using OS X (and I am the ambassador). I usually don't do upgrades without a lot of reading but in this case I jumped right in. The installation went reasonably well and I was able to muddle through the System Preferences and get on line. However there were a few things that were not right and I borrowed the 1st Edition (11th printing with the 10.1 update) of OS X -The Missing Manual from our City Library. It helped so much that I sprung for my own copy. There were still a few issues as I worked my way through the book where the window pictured in the book did not match the window that Jaguar presented to me.
When the 2nd edition of OS X - The Missing Manual became available I decided that I needed to see if it could answer all of my remaining questions. The 2nd edition covers Jaguar 10.2 (see the "seal" on the front cover) and has 124 pages more text than the first edition. The author has extensively rewritten the book to cover the over 150 new features that appear in Jaguar while retaining his inimitable style.
My bottom line is that OS X The Missing Manual is still the best general book for the OS X user. If you don't already have it, buy, it you won't regret it. If you have the 1st Edition the 2nd Edition is still a worth while addition to your library - Jaguar is different enough from the earlier versions of OS X that you will find the 2nd edition worth while as reference book.
OS X - The Missing Manual is organized into 5 parts.
Areas covered the 2nd Edition and omitted or glossed over in the 1st Edition include FindFile, Sherlock3, Menulets, System Preferences, Inkwell, Airport, Firewalls, Mail and it's Spam Filter. iChat, iCal, and Installing OS X.
While I don't consider myself a power user, I do have about a dozen years experience with Macs. Nevertheless I found about a dozen "I didn't know that"s as a read the 2nd Edition which I will find useful in my day to day computer experience. About half of these were Jaguar unique items - the remaining items were mentioned briefly in the 1st edition but the text in the 2nd edition was so much more explicit that I could see the benefits of changing my habits.
Mac OS - The Missing Manual is published by O'Reilly. The list price is $29.95 but there is a MUG discount from O'Reilly and discounts between 20 and 40% are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc.