Customer Reviews

Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been using Mac OS X since the first public beta, and have some other Unix experience. I must say, this book has taken me a long way towards applying the things I know about other Unix environments to Mac OS X. Despite my Mac OS X experience, I feel that this book has taught me a lot about the Darwin flavor of Unix. As an added bonus, the book's careful explinations have helped me to better understand the other Unix platforms I have worked with.

All and all, this was a good, if technical, book. Perfect for anybody who is interested in porting Unix software to Mac OS X, as well as the Unix admin who wants to get the most out of the new environment. However, unlike the title maintains, you don't have to be a Unix geek to get something worthwhile from the reading - though you may consider yourself one after carefully going through this book.

My only complaint is that the book leaves you wanting more information in some areas. Thankfully, it is always quick to point you to other O'Reilly titles that fill in the gaps.

I am very happy to have found this book. I have been using BSD and Linux based platforms for many years now, and I was a little bit blown away by how much there is to adjust to on OS X. This book provided a fantastic set of hints as to where I should look to discover the OS X way of doing things. Highly recommended!

As the title say, this is a book to facilitate the transition of Unix
experts (or at least, proficient users) to OS X, and it certainly does.
We recently bought a Mac Pro to be used as a server but it came with the
usual OS X (not the server version) installed. I have worked before in
Linux an other Unices. Since our needs are restricted (serve file systems
via ssh, open remote desktops and serve web pages) the client version of
OS X (which, as Linux, is also server is some capabilities are enabled)
can be used. The book gives tips to make this and many other things,
apart from pointing to the most useful packages of software to be installed in a machine that is to be used for desktop, server and
programming.
Summarizing, an excellent book.

Brian Jepson, Ernest E. Rothman and Rich Rosen's MAC OSX FOR UNIX GEEKS, 4TH EDITION now covers Leopard and offers a fine survey of the 'geekier' side of Mac OS X. This book bridges Apple's Darwin OS and traditional Unix systems, offering insights on how to perform common Unix tasks in Mac OS X's different environment. Learn how to compile code, install open source software through Fink and MacPorts, and more.

Bought this after a co-worker let me borrow their copy ... had to have my own. Definitely helped to understand some of the inner-workings and to correlate with what I'm accustomed to.

I love Mac OS X, but I could not learn how to use it until I bought this book. Of course I bought "The Missing Manual" by David Pogue, but even with that excellent book, I could not learn how OS X accounts and permissions work from the GUI point of view. Then I bought "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" and I saw clearly how OS X accounts and permissions work from the Unix-like foundation. Now I can open a Terminal window and type "pwd" to see my home directory is in the "/Users" directory. I can go to the root ("cd /") and list the contents ("ls") to see how the rest of the machine is laid out. Now that I see where everything really is (hidden by the GUI), now I can learn how the multiple accounts and permissions work. And now I can use the GUI, too.

My opinion may be in the minority, but I found this book was essential to get me started using my Mac, even to use the GUI that is supposed to be so user-friendly and self-evident.

I am a longtime Unix/Linux user/expert. I also used MacOS before switching to Windows (partly so I could dual boot into Linux) in ~1998. I just switched back to Mac, largely because Macs now have Unix under the hood and let me run (via virtualization) Windows and Linux simultaneously. I wanted a book to help me understand the things that are similar and different between Mac OS X and Linux. This book was generally good, but had some fluff that I wasn't interested in. In general the book had enough technical details to be useful and I could just skip the fluff.