Mac OS X Hints

I have been reading Rob Griffiths http://www.macosxhints.com/ since it came out years ago, and I am so happy he made this book. He has culled all the best hints from his web site, and rewritten them with plenty of photos, and extras. The stuff on customizing your OS X Unix Shell alone is well worth the price of the book. You don't know what you are missing on the Unix side of OS X until you start playing around with some of his advanced tips. I couldn't recommend this more!!!!

One more hit for the Pogue Press/O'Reilly team. This book is rich of real, useful, great hints. Just the ones about DVD snapshots, Add Ons, and some basic Unix hacks are worth the book. The truth is these are not hints that you will find elsewhere, and no useless tips made it into this volume. Worth every cent.

Written by Rob Griffiths and edited by David Pogue, Mac OS X Hints: Jaguar Edition is a 421-page burgeoning collection of tips, tricks, techniques, and secrets to improved performance and making the best use of Mac OS X 10.2. Ranging from putting six hours of music on a single CD; to making iDisk work ten times faster; to a secret emacs adventure game, and a great deal more, Mac OS X Hints is an enjoyable and very highly recommended supplementary resource for Mac OS X users who are already familiar with the basics and want to add some new twists to their computer desktop.

Addressing the ObviousThe most immediate question I had when I heard that O'Reilly would be publishing a book containing hints from macosxhints.com was, of course, why I should get the book when the hints are already on the site for free. Both the author and the publisher also thought of this, understandably enough. Here's how Rob Griffiths answered the question in a post on the site, when the book was first announced: "The book isn't just a "cut and paste" job from the site to print form. Every hint was rewritten and retested from scratch, and hundreds of screenshots were added to help clarify and explain the hints. In addition, many of the scripts and programs posted here are included (the author of each program was contacted for approval to include their original work in the book - thanks to each of you for agreeing!)." So the question then becomes: is this really the case? Are the differences between the hints as posted on the site and as printed in the book really significant enough to merit shelling out [money]?The short answer would be that, in my opinion, the book is worth its price. The long answer is (predictably) a little more complicated. There are, of course, people who are more than willing to do the extra digging on the web to get the relevant content for free - they'd rather do without the little perks (increased readability, revision, testing, screenshots) than spend potential beer money for a glossy O'Reilly book. And that's fine - I'm more than sympathetic with this position, being frequently hard up for beer money, myself. But of course there are also people for whom the convenience is just as important as the cost, and who consider the price of the book well worth it in terms of the time saved. If you fall into the former category, don't bother buying the book - but then, you weren't going to buy it anyway, were you? As for the latter group, rest assured that your investment will not, in this case, be wasted.What I LikedI've read several other books on Mac OS X. The one I believe everyone should start with is still David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. If you've already read this book (and enjoyed it) or didn't read it but are confident you've already got the equivalent experience, then Mac OS X Hints is a good next step. Griffiths assumes you're comfortable using OS X for basic tasks - he doesn't tell you how to log in, or what the Dock is. If you're fuzzy on those kind of basics, you're not quite ready for this book (but you're positively crying out for a copy of the Missing Manual). Additionally, he pushes some not-entirely-obvious processes to the introduction, so you don't have to read the same instructions over and over in the meat of the book itself. After all, once you've been told the first time how to view the contents of a package, you're probably all set in that regard. This is one of the aspects of Mac OS X Hints that I found most appealing, actually - Griffiths just explains in the beginning that he's assu