At last! Function as well as information, June 19, 2002

By	Fred Showker "DTG Magazine" (The Design Bookshelf) - See all my reviews

Yes, Missing Manuals are good. As are Little Books, Bibles and Inside books. However few of those tomes fit your pocket, purse or brief case as beautifully as this little gem does! It's an essential quick-reference on OS X that all new users will use at least several times on the very first day it arrives.

Not only does it contain all the really essential commands and keys, it includes basic UNIX command info, printer, modem configurations, and a host of other important help one may need while at the desk or on the road. Add a user, remove a user, tune the dock, correct OS preferences, log in, log out, change passwords, and do just about anything the unfriendly new OS requires you to do.

I actually like it better than the frustrating online guide help. It is well organized, has a good table of contents and index, and is designed with a simple, easy to understand format.

But it's not just about help. Just thumbing through it you'll pick up tips that you hadn't thought of before. (Like building and using the powerful locate database!) It's a great little book, fits nicely in the brief case for travel and gives you the support you need when you need it.

Yes, I bought David Pogue's "Missing OS X Manual" for the kids and at home. I bought Robin William's wonderful "Little OS X Book" to send off to college with my son. But this one . . . it's in MY brief case all the time.

Although the Designer's Bookshelf concentrates on books in the visual communications fields, the Max OS X Pocket Reference caught all our Mac User's fancy and won itself a place in the Design-Bookshelf.com Editor's Choice Circle for July 2002.

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Good intro for "switchers", less useful as a reference, November 25, 2002

By	David M. Ng (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Part II covers the basics of Mac OS X including window usage and keyboard shortcuts, the Finder and Dock, the Classic environment, and managing user accounts and logging in. The "Basic Keyboard Shortcuts" chart is especially handy.

Part III discusses system preferences and the applications and utilities that come with OS X. A future edition of this book would be much more useful if it provided information on the various "iApplications" (e.g., iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes) and the other applications that come bundled with OS X. The book currently provides a one-paragraph description of the various applications but nothing on how to use them. The section on Developer Tools is so brief as to be almost useless.

Part IV covers the Unix interface to OS X, focusing on using the Terminal application and basic Unix commands. This section seems to be confused about its target audience. Some things are discussed at a very basic level, but at the same time it assumes the reader knows why they want to work with the Unix interface in the first place.

Part V is called "Task and Setting Index" and tells how to accomplish various tasks and configure the system.

Any book about a specific computer technology will become dated. This book was published in May 2002, and at the time of this writing (November 2002), some items discussed in the book are already out of date with the release of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). For example,