Customer Reviews

Mac OS X Snow Leopard for Power Users

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3 star:		(1)
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As a former comp sci professor and four-year Mac user, I should be the target audience for this book and that is probably why Apress sent me a copy and asked me to review it. I was so disappointed to find a book that should never have been printed. It is a book that desperately wants to be a website (or a regularly updated ebook), but as printed material, its useful shelf life can be measured in single-digit months. With the latest version of Mac OS X (Lion) already announced for a summer 2011 release, the clock is ticking and this book comes too late to be taken for anything more than a curiosity... something to glance through at the bookstore and possibly gain a few tips from, but not to buy... not at the price on my publisher-provided copy of fifty bucks (now smartly lowered to forty), but only buyable at half that.

So what's not to like? Well, look at your bookstore shelves for a book on how to use a particular application. That book has a finite useful life and if it's a Microsoft app, that's about 3-5 years. But what if the book has several dozen apps with shorter update timelines than Microsoft? Well, that means that portions of the book will become obsolete very quickly. In the case of this book, chapter 4 talks about Safari, but it is Safari 4 and not the current Safari 5 with extension support. The author notes this in the intro to chapter 4, but nothing is done to remove the now-pointless and lengthy discussion about how to hack Input Managers to get around Safari 4's lack of extension support.

Another thing that comes across fine on a website or ebook is the less formal writing style, grammar, and conversational tone that you wouldn't expect to see in a computer book that targets "power users." Thus, we get a lot of unneeded trash-talk about applications, the business models chosen by their developers, and user interface design (when you insult an app and then praise the most recent version that "fixes the problem," why bother griping about old versions that nobody is going to see?). If you can overlook the spotty grammar, endless self-promotion of the author's other books, and aging hipster tone ("Bee-yoo-teeful", "abso-frickin'-lutely", "Dude!", "What the...? Not cool guys. Not cool at all."), then there ARE some useful tips to pick up here if you already own these apps or are thinking about downloading and/or buying them. Of course, there are magazines that provide similar content (i.e. product reviews) on a regular basis and they are updated once a month and you can get years of information for the cost of the cover price of this book. Or course, there are websites that do the same thing for free.

So would I buy this book? Definitely not in print unless I could find it for less than half the cover price. Now if the ebook is regularly updated and updates are pushed to customers, then I could see this being a great investment at full price. There are numerous URLs and code/command-line snippets in this book that readers will definitely want the click-ability and copy'n'paste-ability (e.g. the 256 character search command in chapter 3 or the code on page 64 that has a bug in it caused by an error in using two if-then statements when one if-then-else is actually needed) that an ebook can provide. And the weird sizes of some pictures, odd fonts, and large blank gaps at the bottom of many pages tell me that this book was designed to be an ebook first and foremost. Buy this as an ebook (if regularly updated) or a printed copy (at half price), but watch the clock and expect to be spending a lot of time checking websites for more recent info.

Full disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

If you already know your way around Mac OS X Snow Leopard but want to learn some power user tricks, this is the book for you. Scott Granneman has done a fine job of making some of the more advanced Snow Leopard features understandable and accessible for experienced users. The writing is clear, concise, and friendly in tone -- not something you see every day in a computer book.

Much of the content covers third-party applications (a number of them free or inexpensive) you can use to clean things up, tighten performance, or add functionality. In most cases, several program options are presented and compared, and guidance is given as to which might be the right solution for you based on your needs.

As an experienced, long-time Mac user measuring somewhere around a 4 on the 1-10 geekiness scale, I found the technical level of this book to be appropriate and only occasionally challenging. However, I did gloss over several of the more technical sections. Frankly, searching for files by metadata via the command line is something I can't see myself doing with any regularity, and I have no desire to replace the Finder with another program, but it's good that the info is there should I ever decide I want to do those things.

While there is some content here that isn't all that useful to me right now for the way I use my computer, there was plenty here that was valuable to me. In the first few chapters I found some great tips for improving performance and working more efficiently, and the chapters on security and backups were very useful. Potentially the most useful for me was chapter 11, "Key Utility Tools for Text & Archives." I'm an editor who works with words all day, and I'm looking forward to testing some of the tips presented there.

Overall, I found this book to be worth my time, and I recommend it to those who would like to take the next step with Snow Leopard.

This book is organized as follows:

1 Introduction: Advanced Secrets of Mac OS X
(Basic Administration)
2 Maintaining Your Mac
3 Expanding Upon the Basic Tools
{Internet)
4 Using Safari to Its Fullest
5 Stepping Beyond Safari
6 Using the Internet to Its Fullest
(Security)
7 Securing Your Mac & Network
8 Backing Up Your Mac
(Multimedia)
9 Manipulating and Sharing Pictures
10 Having More Fun With Audio & Video
(Advanced Administration)
11 Key Utility Tools for Text & Archives
12 Digging Deep as an Admin

Each chapter focuses on a few related tasks, such as managing passwords, encrypting your data, and ssh, which are covered in chapter 7. For most tasks, a few third party applications are recommended to accomplish them. Some tasks can be accomplished with Automator, and detailed instructions are provide for each. There are a number of system preferences that can be manipulated to accomplish some tasks, and Terminal commands are provided where applicable.

The book covers a good range of topics, and the writing is clear and concise. No time is wasted on things any power user should know, such as how to install an application. Screenshots are liberally used to illustrate specific settings, results, etc.

The author provides detailed instructions on using all the applications he recommends, along with information on what each does well, or not so well. I found that it was easy to choose the right application for my needs after reading each topic.

The one complaint I have with the book, and it is a minor one, is the heavy reliance on third party applications. The majority of these are paid applications, but there are a few good free ones. I did find a few free gems, such as Onyx (a multifunction system utility) and Namebench (a utility to test nameserver speeds). There are, however, a number of tasks that can be accomplished with command line options, using system tools such as automator, or by manipulating system preferences. These tasks, such as improving the dock, speeding up safari and making mail faster, were the most useful in my opinion, and the books strong suit. I highly recommend this book.

I liked the conversational tone of the book - it made it more fun to read, rather than coming across as a dry professorial tome or reference. Almost like hanging out with a friend; listening to him tell me about this great new program that he found.

Some authors copy large amounts of information from the internet, adding nothing but page count to their book. I like the fact that this author will just point you to the appropriate URLs when those web sites speak for themselves.

Some authors, when describing applications, list every option and show you every screenshot and laboriously explain every one of them. I like the way that this author just shows you screenshots that matter and only tells you about the options that he likes and why.

There is a *LOT* of information here that takes a long time to go through front to back. I recommend that you start out by glancing at the intro to each section to see if it grabs you. If not, move on to the next chapter and come back to read that chapter some other time. But, in any case, you should definitely read chapters 1 (Introduction), 2 (Maintaining Your Mac), and 7 (Securing Your Mac). The sections on setting preferences with Terminal and using the 1Password utility are essential.

But, don't take my word for it -- go to apress [dot] com and search for "power user snow" - this book should be the first entry in the list. Click the entry and on the left side of the page (under the picture of the book's front cover), you should see an icon for "Google Preview". If you don't, then turn JavaScript on -- or if you're using NoScript in Firefox, then tell NoScript to allow *BOTH* apress.com and google.com (allowing them to run scripts temporarily is good enough, but I allow both permanently = up to you). Now that you can see the "Google Preview" icon, click it and you'll get a window that lets you see about a half page at a time -- just use the scroll bar on the right to scroll through the book.

As a relatively new Mac user (but accomplished windows and competent Linux user) this book was useful in some ways. I was always under the impression that OS X was Apple's take on UNIX ... locked down and controlled to preserve the "Mac experience." The author dispelled that myth for me right in the introduction. I could have found much of these hints, tips and insider knowledge if I was willing to spend the time to dig deep enough on the 'net' AND knew what I was looking for to begin with. But to have these things laid all out for me in an easy to use book was, I have to admit, a time saver. Call me lazy. Don't be misled, though, as this isn't an in-depth tutorial in the style you might be more accustomed to. Much of it is a review of what you can do using third-party applications (many at a nominal fee). So my overall rating is on the lower side due to this book's approach. Will it leave you as what I define as a "power user"? Probably not.

But I appreciated that the author did a lot of legwork for me. There are so many different apps out there that you can use to tweak your system and just make being a Mac user a much better experience. For me, finding them, trying them out and comparing them against all the other options consumes more time than I'm willing to give up. Of course, I prefer making my own decisions, but I feel like I was given a head start and definitely saved some time exploring. There were also many useful little tidbits that I'm sure I would have come across at some point or another as I continued to use the system, but having them scattered about the book like little hidden treasures in between the various portions made it a more enjoyable read.

Something else you should consider is that while the information was not useless, it was definitely dated ... some already out of date and even acknowledged by the author. I believe overall, you will come away being able to better control your own computing experience, but you won't leave with a feeling of expertise.