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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth The Money, June 17, 2003
Addressing the Obvious
The most immediate question I had when I heard that O'Reilly would be publishing a book containing hints from macosxhints.com was, of course, why I should get the book when the hints are already on the site for free. Both the author and the publisher also thought of this, understandably enough. Here's how Rob Griffiths answered the question in a post on the site, when the book was first announced: "The book isn't just a "cut and paste" job from the site to print form. Every hint was rewritten and retested from scratch, and hundreds of screenshots were added to help clarify and explain the hints. In addition, many of the scripts and programs posted here are included (the author of each program was contacted for approval to include their original work in the book - thanks to each of you for agreeing!)." So the question then becomes: is this really the case? Are the differences between the hints as posted on the site and as printed in the book really significant enough to merit shelling out [money]? The short answer would be that, in my opinion, the book is worth its price. The long answer is (predictably) a little more complicated. There are, of course, people who are more than willing to do the extra digging on the web to get the relevant content for free - they'd rather do without the little perks (increased readability, revision, testing, screenshots) than spend potential beer money for a glossy O'Reilly book. And that's fine - I'm more than sympathetic with this position, being frequently hard up for beer money, myself. But of course there are also people for whom the convenience is just as important as the cost, and who consider the price of the book well worth it in terms of the time saved. If you fall into the former category, don't bother buying the book - but then, you weren't going to buy it anyway, were you? As for the latter group, rest assured that your investment will not, in this case, be wasted. What I Liked
I've read several other books on Mac OS X. The one I believe everyone should start with is still David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. If you've already read this book (and enjoyed it) or didn't read it but are confident you've already got the equivalent experience, then Mac OS X Hints is a good next step. Griffiths assumes you're comfortable using OS X for basic tasks - he doesn't tell you how to log in, or what the Dock is. If you're fuzzy on those kind of basics, you're not quite ready for this book (but you're positively crying out for a copy of the Missing Manual). Additionally, he pushes some not-entirely-obvious processes to the introduction, so you don't have to read the same instructions over and over in the meat of the book itself. After all, once you've been told the first time how to view the contents of a package, you're probably all set in that regard. This is one of the aspects of Mac OS X Hints that I found most appealing, actually - Griffiths just explains in the beginning that he's assuming certain things, and then doesn't bother dumbing anything else down. I've been a fan of macosxhints.com since I first installed OS X, but it seems like Griffiths's style has really improved for the book - this may be a function of Pogue's role as editor, as the writing in Hints displays the same familiar, comfortable tone while not skimping on depth or details. Like other books Pogue has been involved in, this one is highly readable but not oversimplified. What I Didn't Like
If I can be nitpicky for a moment, I was bothered by the frequency of purely typographical errors. Little things like "than" being used instead of "then", or the bottom edge of a line in a sidebar getting cut off. It didn't keep me from enjoying the book, and I'm sure it's the sort of thing that will get corrected in future printings, but this sort of error occured often enough that I noticed it, anyway. Another little thing was that I wish URLS had been included whenever a third-party shareware program was mentioned. Of course I know I can Google for DragThing and find it immediately - but if I'm paying for a book, it seems to me that I shouldn't have to. One final note: there's a lot of overlap between this book and Mac OS X Hacks, although each book has a significant amount of unique content. If you own one, you probably don't need to get the other, but it's difficult to say which I'd buy if I had to choose. Hacks contains only 100 articles, but they're more in-depth and the tasks they cover are often trickier or less obvious. Hints contains over 500 tidbits, but they're much shorter and often deal with things like key commands that allow you to increase your efficiency, and things of that ilk.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intelligent, Entertaining and Indispensable, May 27, 2003
I knew from his macosxhints web site Rob Griffiths was an honest, hard working, modest and generous guy with an eye for quality and esthetics. No doubt he's also loyal, obedient, brave, thrifty, clean and reverent. I didn't know until I read Mac OS X Hints, the book, that he was a literary genius. Clearly, the Pogue vibes energized Rob's creativity. The writing is entertaining while the hints are novel and valuable. Ignoring the author's suggestion I read the book from cover to cover. It's really nice to read paragraph after paragraph of geek gook and enjoy the text. I frequently got the "what's so hilarious now?" look from wife as I giggled and laughed out loud. I also found myself talking to the book -- "cool, I knew that", "hmm... interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind", "wow!", "OMG! that's how you do that!", etc. The entire range of nerd emotions.It was clear the book was a winner after reading the preface; The Missing Credits. A clean, honest list of who's responsible, complete with email addresses. The quality is evident before you get to the introduction -- even the blurb "About Pogue Press" was amusing and encouraging. There's no explanation that a paragraph labeled "Tip" is a "Tip" or courier font means it's supposed to look like teletype output. That's refreshing. A book that assumes I can read a book. The cover boasts 500 hints. Leave it to Griffiths to be modest on the cover. There are 563 hints -- any other book would say "Over 500 Hints" or "almost 600 Hints". There's no animal on the cover. More points. This book was so obviously going to be good I wanted to write the review before I finished the introduction. But I wanted to read the book too, so I held off. Of course my impression was not only justified, but enhanced. Mac OS X Hints is a motivator that familiarizes you with things you might have figured you can accomplish somehow but never took the time to work out. Here, so many gems are in one place, the time you take will reward you with useful techniques you'll pick up immediately and use continually. The hints go into effect as soon as you touch your computer. As someone who's been using Unix for 25 years, Mac OS X since it was made public, and lives and breathes sites and forums like macosxhints I didn't think I would learn a lot. I was wrong. I picked up a ton of new stuff. In fact, I noted the number of hints in each chapter I found new and interesting (as opposed the ones I already knew about, could easily have looked up, or simply didn't care about -- for instance I skipped the section on OS 9 Classic). A third of the hints (190 of 563) were winners for me. Most of the other two thirds were fun to read anyway and many of them were useful micro refreshers. (I'm using perhaps my favorite new hint while writing this. Why didn't I notice before that highlighting a misspelled word and right-clicking revealed the suggested spelling at the top of the contextual menu, and selecting it replaces the misspelling? Now I use that constantly.) Mac OS X Hints only gets 5 of 5 stars. Why not 6? Having about 10 times more experience with Unix than Mac OS X and being extraordinarily picky about facts and presentation I wasn't as delighted with the Unix chapters as I was with the rest of the book. They were alright, most of the content even good, but I would quibble with a couple of the facts and some of the wording. Nevertheless I noted 20 hints in those two chapters that tickled my fancy. There is a lot of information in Mac OS X Hints and you're not going to remember it all but you probably will remember that you read something about a way to do this or that. The book so far has served as an excellent reference volume. The index has lead me to an answer every time, first time and he table of contents lists each hint as well. I wish all the URLs mentioned had been listed in an appendix. But then, I always do. I've just placed an Amazon order of a dozen copies for my family and closest (geographically) friends. If you're not among them get your own copy. You won't be disappointed.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tips, tricks, techniques, & secrets to improved performance, July 19, 2003
Written by Rob Griffiths and edited by David Pogue, Mac OS X Hints: Jaguar Edition is a 421-page burgeoning collection of tips, tricks, techniques, and secrets to improved performance and making the best use of Mac OS X 10.2. Ranging from putting six hours of music on a single CD; to making iDisk work ten times faster; to a secret emacs adventure game, and a great deal more, Mac OS X Hints is an enjoyable and very highly recommended supplementary resource for Mac OS X users who are already familiar with the basics and want to add some new twists to their computer desktop.
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