Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger: Visual Quickpro Guide

After reading through this book, I had no trouble at all setting up a small office server with mail & web services. Schoun Regan has written a book that is easy to read and easy to follow. I hope that an update to this book is written right after Tiger is released.

If you're migrating from Appleshare 6.3 and OS 9 in general, this is the book for you. Apple's Xserve guide spends too much time discussing concepts. This book contains clear, concise chapters on LDAP and Directory Services, which are totally new technologies for ASIP users. The plethora of screen shots throughout the book really clears up the mystery behind this advanced piece of software. After reading this book, I finally know what I'm doing.

This is the first book released for Mac OS X Server. It is written so that a novice can understand, yet detailed enough for the intermediate user. Also makes a good source for documentation for when you are on vacation and a Windows admin needs to do something for you.

The Visual QuickPro Guides have an interesting design philosophy that is a cross between a tutorial and a reference book. I guess I'd call it tutorial based, but organized so that you can look up what you need and then get straight to what you are looking for without having to go one step at a time through a tutorial. They claim that this offers the fastest way to learn tasks and concepts. I find it hard to dissagree with this view. Let's say you want to set up Mail Services. You can turn to Chapter 8 and go through the whole thing page by page. But, if you just want to set up mailing lists, the index will send to you to page 277 within Chapter 8 that tells you just exactly how to do this. The mailing list section is set aside so that while it logically flows through Chapter 8, you can also jump to just that section and not have to read about other parts of the mailing list program.

Covering Mac OS X Server in a single book is a hard, hard thing to do. You certainly can't get everything in there; there's just too much. But for all those limitations, the authors certainly manage to do an awesome job. The fact is that the documentation included with Mac OS X Server - and the stuff available online at Apple's website - is woefully inadequate. This book fills that void and does it really well. From start to finish, the authors seem to have made every effort to avoid a situation where the reader looks at a section and goes "huh?" The section on Mail services is pretty cool, as is the stuff on Web Services and Open Directory. This is a definite must-have for anyone working on or thinking about deploying Mac OS X Server, be it in an SMB setting or in larger-scale enterprise scenarios. Schoun Regan has a well-deserved reputation as one of Apple's finest Certified Trainers and his shows at Macworld are consistently packed. This book represents a healthy chunk of his knowledge and experience.