Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) [Paperback]

Andy Lester (Author), Chris Stone (Author), Chuck Toporek (Author), Jason McIntosh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2005 | Series: In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)

Following the common-sense O'Reilly style, Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell cuts through the chaff and gives you practical details you can use every day. Everything you need to know about the Unix side of Mac OS X has been systematically documented in this book.

Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell offers a complete overview of Mac OS X Tiger (Version 10.4), focusing on the BSD Unix layer. This book familiarizes you with over 300 of Tiger's Unix commands, the Terminal application, file management, system and network administration issues, and more.

Completely revised for Mac OS X Tiger, this book offers:

• The most complete and thorough coverage of Mac OS X's Unix commands you'll find anywhere (even in the system)
• An overview of basic system and network administration features, including coverage of NetInfo and Directory Services
• An introduction to using Mac OS X's Unix command-line interface, the Terminal application
• An overview of Mac OS X's Unix text editors, including vi and Emacs
• Information on shell syntax variables for Tiger's default Unix shell, bash

Each command and option in this book's Unix Command Reference has been painstakingly tested and checked against Tiger; even the manpages that ship with Mac OS X can't compete in accuracy. Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell is the most comprehensive quick reference on the market and is a must for any serious Mac user.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andy Lester has been a professional programmer for 18 years and a Perl evangelist for a decade. By day, he manages programmers for Follett Library Resources in McHenry, IL. By night, he spreads the gospel of automated testing and maintains over a dozen CPAN modules. Lester also writes for The Perl Journal, and three of his hacks have been published in Spidering Hacks by O'Reilly.

Chris Stone ([e-mail]) is a Senior Systems Administrator (the Mac guy) at O'Reilly Media, Inc. and coauthor of Mac OS X in a Nutshell. He's written several Mac OS X related articles for the O'Reilly MacDevCenter (www.macdevcenter.com), and contributed to Mac OS X: The Missing Manual from Pogue Press. Chris lives in Petaluma, California with his wife, Miho, and two sons, Andrew and Jonathan.

Chuck Toporek is a Mac technology geek. He is the author of three Mac books and one medical book, and he has written for MacAddict and Macworld magazines.

Jason McIntosh lives and works in and around Boston. He has co-authored two O'Reilly books, Mac OS X in a Nutshell and Perl & XML, and writes occasional columns and weblog entries for the O'Reilly Network. His homepage is at http://www.jmac.org.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 3rd edition (November 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596009437
• ISBN-13: 978-0596009434
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,871,161 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > Computers & Technology > Apple > Mac OS X UNIX

More About the Author

Andy Lester has developed software for more than twenty years in the business world and on the Web in the open source community. Years of sifting through resumes, interviewing unprepared candidates, and even some unwise career choices of his own have spurred him to write this nontraditional book on the new guidelines for tech job hunting. Andy is an active member of the open source community, and lives in the Chicago area.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Command line in a nutshell, December 2, 2005

By 

Charles E. Bouldin "Macs" (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

I opened the box and immediately noticed that this is a -much- smaller book than the Panther edition. The reason? It's about command line Unix, nothing else. This is described as "we've come back to the Unix roots" and that this is consistent with other O'Reilly titles like "Linux in a Nutshell". Perhaps, but titling a book "Tiger in a Nutshell" and discussing only Unix terminal commands is misleading at best, especially since this is a major departure from previous editions.

This isn't a bad unix command reference and it is specialized for the BSD Unix of Tiger. Just don't expect it to be more than that.

If you're looking for a book that covers Tiger -and- the unix commands in a lot of technical depth, you may want to look at "Mac OS X Tiger Unleashed". That isn't in any sense a nutshell book (it's huge) but it has all the material that this book doesn't.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Like A UNIX Reference, December 22, 2005

By 

Daniel McKinnon "Dan" (Tewksbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

Before you go buying this book expecting it to be about Mac OS X with lots of pictures and descriptions about iTunes and the like, if that's what you are looking for this book is NOT for you. If you are looking for a reference on UNIX commands and how to use the Terminal mode on the Mac with OS X 10.4 then you are in the right place. Chock full of more than 500 pages, I really like the way that this book is laid out. Not too long, not too short, this reference lays out all the relevant UNIX commands that you would find useful on the Mac and provides short descriptions of how each command should be used.

There is some discussion on the xWindows system and Network Services, but this is mainly a reference on UNIX commands and all the keyboard shortcuts available in emacs.

A very nice reference for Max OS X users who use the Terminal on a daily basis. If you are a UNIX expert you probably won't get a lot out of this book, but if you do use the UNIX side of things on the Mac it's probably worth the purchase to add to your library.

***** RECOMMENDED

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent command line reference for OS X, March 6, 2006

By 

R. Dlugy-Hegwer (Northern California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

Yes, this is a command-line centric book - because that's where all the POWER is (the graphical user interface is well designed and hardly needs a reference). This book provides a great OS X-specific reference - so you won't have to test all the commands in your "UNIX in a Nutshell" book to see which ones work. Aside from the command line, this book provides important information on Managing Mac OS X (See PART THREE, below) and an excellent index for finding your information. The sections (and approximate page count) in this book are:

PART ONE - Commands and Shells
Introduction - 3 pages
Unix Command Reference - 251 pages
Using the Terminal - 13 pages
Shell Overview - 3 pages
bash: The Bourne-Again Shell - 10 pages

PART TWO - Text Editing and Processing
Pattern Matching - 3 pages
The Vi Editor - 34 pages
The Emacs Editor - 12 pages

PART THREE - Managing Mac OS X
Filesystem Overview - 15 pages
Directory Services - 15 pages
Running Network Services - 10 pages
The X Window System - 11 pages
The Defaults System - 3 pages

INDEX