Customer Reviews

Cross-Platform Mac Handbook, The: Keeping Your MAC In A Digital World

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This book does exactly what it says it will do: it teaches you how to operate your Mac in a non-Mac world giving many, many practical solutions. It even gives impractical solutions when no practical solutions are available! Published in year 2000, it is a treasure of fresh web links that allow you to get current information on every topic covered. Instead of going into boring, techno-babble the book focuses on giving scenarios of what is trying to be accomplished, such as finding the best way to transfer files between Macs, PCs, and Unix platform machines. Then it provides solutions in general terms naming any hardware or software required to accomplish the task. Finally, it provides a resource list at the end of each topic which includes related commercial, shareware, and freeware publishers, hardware manufacturers, and their web sites. If you are the person in your cross-platform organization or school that other people rely on to provide them answers, this book is a valuable resource!

That is what this rather simple book is, a beginning. Having been out of the MAC world for years and, over the past week
back in it, I was expecting more. But I read (or skimmed) cover to cover and found that one week of hands on has brought me to a point beyond this effort.
With 10, 10.2 and 10.3 out already, this book is a bit behind. There are WONDERFUL (and I mean that) links, resources and 'further reads' listed and that is a great part of the text. But for anything beyond basic, I'd go elsewhere or wait for Hart to follow up. More performance issues, some step by step (for instance, updating Macs, bringing across email in a Windows network? How? Something I ran into in replacing older Macs)
Overall a great effort and does simplify. It's a beginning.