Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks

Excellent. Very helpful. And even if you are a real geek who prefers to look up the man pages, or consult mailing list archives, you shouldn't dismiss this book too quickly. It covers the basics and goes on to less obvious matters. No matter how expert you already are, the chance is high that you shall find a great deal of useful material here.

This is a niche book for a very specific audience; those engineers who are _switching_ from another flavor of *nix to OS X. And it does a great job at showing the benefits and pitfalls of making that switch. X Windows, compiling and coding, systems administration, these are all covered. But they are covered at the level of informing someone who already knows the basics. In other words, you won't be treated like an idiot. And I appreciate that. If you are just starting out with OS X and you have had experience with other Unix environments, this is is the book for you.

As the title implies this is a book for UNIX experts. If you need a course for beginners, I found the "UNIX essentials" DVD to be very effective. The book and DVD make a nice couple if you want to get it quickly and in deep.

Someone told me once that coming from UNIX is like coming from Mars. He was a Windows user, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether to forgive him or not. ;) But he did have a point. We do things differently in the UNIX world, and we're used to understanding how our operating systems work down at the nuts and bolts level. We get really frustrated when we're asked to do something useful with a modern desktop OS where everything is hidden from us. MacOS X is both UNIX and a modern desktop OS. This book explains the nuts and bolts to you--how launchd, spotlight, and other bits of Tiger work, how to use and make frameworks, how to compile software, how to make your system work the way a UNIX system should, and how to run a solid server even with the client version of Tiger are all covered. Tiger features such as Dashboard are largely ignored in favor of directory services, databases, and the MacOS X firewall.