Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger

As a long-time Mac user, Unix was new to me but very exciting once I started tinkering with it. I picked up what I could around the web but knew there were significant holes in my understanding of the fundamentals of Unix. This book was perfect in that it brought both the fundamentals you would get in many Unix books (without being boring) as well as talking about some significant Tiger-specific command line tools like atprint and mdfind (Tiger's Spotlight - a huge improvement over existing Unix search tools). I highly recommend this for anyone who wants the whole picture of how to best use Unix in Tiger.

Dave Taylor makes Unix on the Mac accessible, easy to understand, and fun. New languages can be a puzzle. Quite a bit of time can be spent just trying to understand enough so that you can actually start "learning". Unix for Mac OS X Tiger can be read chapter by chapter or randomly after the first few chapters. Thanks for Dave Taylor's easygoing yet complete explanations I "got it" in a weekend. "Got it" for me means that I have enough information and understanding to use his book (or the man pages) like a cookbook. If you want a new world opened up for you - get this book. It is delightful. This book gets 6 stars but the pulldown only goes to 5.

OS X and its UNIX are truly amazing. I like easy to read book and I also had assumed that learning UNIX is not necessarily has to be a struggle. This book stood up to my expectations almost perfectly: it is very well written and clearly expressed work. It does not overwhelm with technical details and does not press too much. I also followed an advise in someone's review and purchased Linux and UNIX for a beginner training suite, 4DVDs + 2CDs includes 4 Unix Academy Certifications ed.2008 that is complete UNIX course recorded. It also comes with entire UNIX library that covers every subject beginner may think of. 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. The DVD is also made on the basis of Apple's OS X Unix so they really work together. Sure it is a way to start there much of more advanced reading that will take over you with a time however these two provide you with the BASIS! 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

I am a "Classic" Mac OS "Power User." I was accustomed to the power and flexibility of the Classic Mac OS coupled with various third-party utilities & software. Upon recently acquiring an iMac DV with Tiger installed, I wanted to be able to wield similar power over this new computer, but I saw that in order to do so, I would need to learn Unix, since the various third-party utilities I was using previously would not work on Tiger. So I spent some time reading "man" pages and trying to find internet resources, but all the internet resources assumed a basic knowledge of unix, and reading "man" pages presented me with more information than I could process, as all the unix commands have such a large host of options. Shortly thereafter, a friend got me this book. Unlike other materials I had seen, this book did not get bogged down in complex details. Instead, it "walks" the user through the totally novel (to mac users) environment of Terminal, explaining the terse grammar of UNIX, touching on the most useful options. Some cool things I learned from this book include: How to use the terminal to ftp to a site (you don't need fetch!) How to use regular expressions and wildcards to quickly sort through scads of data How to "pipeline" commands to automate in a way that would be much more difficult using applescript. How to change the terminal prompt. Perhaps after the next book, I'll feel confident enough to set up the SSH server. When I emailed Mr. Taylor with a question, I was amazed when he actually responded. He seems like a really cool guy, and I think I'll get his next book, the one on shell scripting.

It's no secret that I rarely review technical books. The big reason for this is that I buy such books to either get a handle on software or hardware issues and tend to only read enough so that I can understand what the real techies are trying to tell me. Sadly, gone are the days of my being a brilliant analyst and designer and only process and architecture are my lot. The arrival a few years ago of a Mac Titanium portable created an opportunity that I promised to take advantage of - sooner or later. Finally, I decided it was time. For those of you who don't know, laying underneath the Mac's glossy user interface is a very well implemented UNIX environment. Thus my first goal was twofold - learn something of the Mac's software underpinnings and to refresh my leaking UNIX skills. Nowadays, almost all is forgotten, other than nervous efforts at 'ls' and 'cd'. When I discovered 'Unix for Mac OS X Tiger' I bought it, and I can honestly state that I read the whole thing. And even enjoyed it. Dave Taylor manages to take the reader through a tour of Unix as the Mac expresses it, showing the reader the marvels of the terminal command line. While he never forgets to introduce the idiosyncracies of the Mac, the truth is that Unix on the Mac (aka Darwin) is pretty much a vanilla Unix, and the book is really an introduction to Unix. And a pretty good one at that. Taylor avoids the excruciating deep dives that many texts fall into, limiting himself to 250 pages of dense but readable discussion that will enable you to work in Unix on the Mac, although you won't be a wizard. Too often technical writers feel compelled to his the 1000 page barrier. This book is a quarter the size. If you want to know everything about vi or emacs, or study shell scripting than you will either want a thicker book, or several thinner books on you topics of interest. Given the usual weight of my briefcase, I refer the latter. Taylor's book will take you through all the standard commands, help you set up your Xterm, and even introduce you to the vagaries of fink. And it's readable enough so that you won't fall asleep in the middle of a regular expression. I have no qualms about recommending this book, especially if you are a novice Unix user who is only beginning to heed the call of his (or her) inner geek.