Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Peachpit Learning Series (Paperback)

~ Robin Williams (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

If you want to tame Mac OS X Tiger, but you want to do so in the comfort of your own home, this guide makes it possible! Robin Williams uses her trademark friendly teaching style to reveal exactly what you want to know: What's new in Tiger, what's great about it, and how can you get the most out of it fast! Focused lessons take you step-by-step through practical, real-world projects that teach Mac OS X Tiger inside and out. Covers everything from upgrading your Mac to Tiger and customizing and troubleshooting your system to all of Tiger's new goodies: configuring the spoken-user interface, audio and video messaging with multiple people at once, a Dashboard full of Widgets, the innovative Spotlight Search system, the enhanced Safari RSS browser, and more.

About the Author

Robin Williams is the author of more than 25 best-selling and award-winning books, including The Little Mac Book, The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Web Book. Through her writing, teaching and seminars, Robin has influenced a generation of computer users in the areas of design, typography, desktop publishing, the Mac, and the Web.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321330226
• ISBN-13: 978-0321330222
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #786,783 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For the beginner to intermediate user, May 4, 2005

By	M. A. Filippelli "Marc12074" (Roseville, CA, US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Peahcpit learning series:

This book is part of the Peachpit learning series and has seventeen lessons that walk you through all of the installation options, how to configure your MAC, personalizing your MAC environment, sharing your MAC files, installing peripherals and navigating through the MAC environment. It also covers some of the new features like Spotlight used for finding anything based on your search criteria, Dashboard used to house application widgets which are shortcuts main features of applications like iTunes, iSync, iChat calculator and weather in your area application with out having to launch the application. The book also covers .Mac, Safari RSS for internet feeds and Automator lessons (used to automate repetitive processes).

The book does a good job in it's use of screenshots in each lesson so that you can have a visual reference of where you should be if you are working through the lessons.

This book is by no means a technical manual, it is meant to show you the user interfaces of OS X and different applications that come with OS X.

I would consider myself an intermediate MAC user and I have used this book couple times to look at the Dashboard and Automator lessons.

For the beginner user this book is probably 5 stars, for the intermediate user it is probably 3 stars, for the advanced user it is probably a 2 star book but clearly this book is geared to (and it's stated audience is) the beginner to intermediate user so I give it 4 stars.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor effort, December 11, 2005

By	D. Mayclin (Santa Cruz, California USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Robin Williams usually does a superb job - she's fun to read, has a perspective which is easy for the reader to understand and puts information clearly while not talking down to readers.

Not this time. If you want a book which tells you more than the very simplest of info about Tiger, don't buy this one. I'm an intermediate level user and I found that there are many glaring gaps in her lessons. I ran into many snags in getting used to switching over from System 9 and she didn't address any of the problems. Nor was her basic information about how Tiger operates useful in helping me trouble shoot the problems.

I wouldn't recommend the book to a new user either, because it was so superficial.

A minor irritant is that the editor (or somebody) did a very poor job of proofing it. There were a significant number of typos throughout the book.

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not much substance, June 4, 2005

By	Naptown (Naptown, Indiana) - See all my reviews

* This is written for a true beginner
* I'm new to Mac, but have much PC experience. The lack of real content was a disappointment. This is a very light overview.
* As a new Mac user, I was looking forward to learning how Mac installs and removes programs. This topic was NOT discussed.
* The information that was chosen for inclusion was clearly communicated and the pictures & pages were high quality.