Review: Two New Macintosh Books from O'Reilly · 348 words posted 06/18/2004 06:59 AM
Last year I came back to the Macintosh platform after a 10 year absence. I couldn’t ask for a better companion for my return journey than Running Mac OS X Panther, by James Duncan Davidson. Most of the GUI programs built into Panther (like Mail, iTunes, and iCal) are intuitive, but if you want to explore Panther’s internals you may need a guide.
Mr. Davidson shows you how the system manages users; how to connect to a Windows network; where plists are stored and what they do; and how to monitor your system usage.
The book is full of useful tips on how to interact with or enhance GUI programs from the command line. For example, Mr. Davidson provides a script to list the files in your home directory and send them through email once a week via iCal.
One of the great draws for programmers coming to OS X is its Unix core. Mr. Davidson introduces the reader to the Terminal and the bash shell, the command line interface for interacting with Unix and the Mac’s internals.
If you need to explore Mac-centric Unix in greater detail, consider Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther by Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson. If you used Pine to read email fifteen years ago, you might be surprised to find it right there on your new Mac. Likewise, the GIMP is there and ready for editing graphics.
Of course, if you suffered through Pine and vi in college because you had to, you might wonder why anyone would want to go back to those programs after moving up to BBEdit and Mail. Unfortunately, Taylor and Jepson seldom move beyond the why-rock-stars-date-models rationale for using Unix on OS X: because they can. The book’s intended audience isn’t clear: Unix gear-heads will likely already know all of the programs described here, but if you’ve never used grep to search text files from a command line, why start now?
Still, I use ftp as often as Transmit, and for only $20 Learning Unix is a handy reference for working with your Mac from the terminal.
* * *