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Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) 3rd Edition

4.1 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0596009434
ISBN-10: 0596009437
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Product Details

  • Series: In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)
  • Paperback: 528 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 3rd edition (November 20, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596009437
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596009434
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,755,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Charles E. Bouldin on December 2, 2005
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
I opened the box and immediately noticed that this is a -much- smaller book than the Panther edition. The reason? It's about command line Unix, nothing else. This is described as "we've come back to the Unix roots" and that this is consistent with other O'Reilly titles like "Linux in a Nutshell". Perhaps, but titling a book "Tiger in a Nutshell" and discussing only Unix terminal commands is misleading at best, especially since this is a major departure from previous editions.

This isn't a bad unix command reference and it is specialized for the BSD Unix of Tiger. Just don't expect it to be more than that.

If you're looking for a book that covers Tiger -and- the unix commands in a lot of technical depth, you may want to look at "Mac OS X Tiger Unleashed". That isn't in any sense a nutshell book (it's huge) but it has all the material that this book doesn't.
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Format: Paperback
Before you go buying this book expecting it to be about Mac OS X with lots of pictures and descriptions about iTunes and the like, if that's what you are looking for this book is NOT for you. If you are looking for a reference on UNIX commands and how to use the Terminal mode on the Mac with OS X 10.4 then you are in the right place. Chock full of more than 500 pages, I really like the way that this book is laid out. Not too long, not too short, this reference lays out all the relevant UNIX commands that you would find useful on the Mac and provides short descriptions of how each command should be used.

There is some discussion on the xWindows system and Network Services, but this is mainly a reference on UNIX commands and all the keyboard shortcuts available in emacs.

A very nice reference for Max OS X users who use the Terminal on a daily basis. If you are a UNIX expert you probably won't get a lot out of this book, but if you do use the UNIX side of things on the Mac it's probably worth the purchase to add to your library.

***** RECOMMENDED
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To be clear, this is a Unix reference. The commands are defined in enough detail to understand and use them easily. It also includes information on command line utilities that are installed with the Xcode Tools. A number of the common UI functions in Tiger have command line equivalents, like Software Update, NetInfo Manager, Grab (screencapture) or Spotlight, so you can create pretty powerful shell scripts. The rest of the information is covered with less detail (i.e. vi, emacs, regular expressions, X11, etc).

The chapters on bash, vi and emacs, for example, are ok - but I'm not sure who would use them. If you're coming from a Unix or Linux background, you probably already know this stuff as the info is pretty basic. If you're coming from Windows, I'd recommend other, more detailed, books for learning bash, vi, emacs, etc.

I like the detail on the metadata (aka Spotlight) commands. I also found a couple fun commands I hadn't used before, for example "say". Now you can have your shell script announce "Dude, I'm done!" on completion. I will be using this book for the Unix command reference and probably not much else, so it works for me.
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Format: Paperback
Yes, this is a command-line centric book - because that's where all the POWER is (the graphical user interface is well designed and hardly needs a reference). This book provides a great OS X-specific reference - so you won't have to test all the commands in your "UNIX in a Nutshell" book to see which ones work. Aside from the command line, this book provides important information on Managing Mac OS X (See PART THREE, below) and an excellent index for finding your information. The sections (and approximate page count) in this book are:

PART ONE - Commands and Shells

Introduction - 3 pages

Unix Command Reference - 251 pages

Using the Terminal - 13 pages

Shell Overview - 3 pages

bash: The Bourne-Again Shell - 10 pages

PART TWO - Text Editing and Processing

Pattern Matching - 3 pages

The Vi Editor - 34 pages

The Emacs Editor - 12 pages

PART THREE - Managing Mac OS X

Filesystem Overview - 15 pages

Directory Services - 15 pages

Running Network Services - 10 pages

The X Window System - 11 pages

The Defaults System - 3 pages

INDEX
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