Mac OS X: The Complete Reference

So Far The Most Complete

Author Jesse Feiler is not unlike the majority of people I have encountered in university physics, maths and computer science departments—inordinately fond of both the Macintosh and Unix operating systems, finding neither of them “too buggy to use”. So he seems as pleased as I am (and not a few hardcore geeks on the Slashdot forum) that Apple has now combined that best of both worlds into Mac OS X.
Even better is that Feiler is eminently well qualified to write on X’s Unix underpinnings and its more traditional Mac OS side—he is the author of a number of books on Perl, database-driven web sites, Mac OS X development, and such trad Mac stalwarts as FileMaker Pro, ClarisWorks, and even CyberDog.
In the Introduction he tells us that he has been using “it for most of my everyday work over the last year and half.” Not too many other authors can make that claim, of having been there with X from well before those first early developer previews. Feiler’s decades-worth experience of mainframes, personal computers and handhelds, with operating systems and applications from firms such as Control Data, Burroughs, IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe make him uniquely qualified to offer a true perspective on what makes Mac OS X so great, and so able to evolve well over the decades to come.
That breadth of experience, especially Feiler’s programming knowledge (his Mac OS X Developer’s Guide is due out shortly), makes Mac OS X: The Complete Reference unique and helps explain why it is already a bestseller, having sold-out its first printing within weeks. Part V: Programming Mac OS X is about using Applescript for automating your Mac--no surprise there—but is also about programming applications in Classic, Carbon and Cocoa, with a walk through in how to build a Nothing application (hey, it’s a programmer thing).
Oddly enough, despite my complete incompetence as a programmer, I easily followed along and built my own copy of the application, proving that Apple’s Mac OS tools are pretty easy to understand and should present few barriers to real programmers, and to building real programs in Cocoa (the Nothing application is actually just a little calculator).
Chapter 21 in the same section is about using the command line, and this again is something most if not all the other Mac OS X books currently out there do not cover. I appreciate being able to learn how to use the command line, especially as I have chosen to have my web projects hosted on one of the biggest and best US-based BSD Unix web hosting services.
At Mac OS X’s core is FreeBSD and BSD 4.4 Lite, courtesy of NeXTStep, and you can use the command line if you elect to. Which is to say that there is absolutely no reason why you should ever have to resort to it all. I know some uninformed users are being terrorised by alleged experts, who should know better, into thinking Mac OS X is not for them because you have to memorise and use all those geeky Unix commands and procedures. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you are a Macintosh veteran new to Mac OS X you will not have many problems getting up to speed in the new OS, despite the lack of a printed manual. True, some familiar parts of Mac OS 9.x will not be there in X, and you may succumb to installing some of the third party utilities that imitate the bits you are missing. But if your experience is anything like mine and that of a few acquaintances then you will soon abandon such temporary crutches and come to appreciate how Apple has rethought the interface.
Mac OS X: The Complete Reference is pretty good as a guide to getting the best out of this new interface, and in showing you that while some aspects may seem a bit odd at first, such as the window controls being usable even when the window itself is inactive. There are many other new features in X besides windows click-through, such as sheets, drawers, and the often-maligned and misunderstood Dock.
As Feiler shows in Chapter 2: Aqua, there is more there than meets the eye to the Dock, and some of those features were added by Apple on request from users, such as adding and opening folders and their contents. As Mac OS X is a new paradigm albeit one with many similarities to an old one Apple has been actively soliciting input from users and the Dock’s more sophisticated features are the evidence.
Subsequent chapters work through working with files, printing, setting preferences, security and logging in, Apple’s web-based iTools, networking both locally and over the Internet, services, working with applications such as iMovie, iTunes, Mail, and AppleWorks, and again, uniquely, how to use Mac OS X Server.
While Mac OS X client is remarkable enough, being a desktop operating system that also has contains its own copy of the most popular industrial-strength web server in Apache, Mac OS X Server includes specially rewritten and finetuned versions of MySQL, PHP, Perl, SSL, Samba, WebDav, BSD networking, NetBoot, Macintosh manager, QuickTime Streaming, JavaServer Pages, and all the usual network and Internet services as well as WebObjects deployment. Incidentally, Feiler recently authored the Perl 5 Programmer’s Notebook and the WebObjects 5 for Java Developer’s Guide.
Nothing like a dose of the truth to dispel the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). And nothing like an author of Jesse Feiler’s standing to reveal the facts about this exciting new operating system.

The Book:

Title: Mac OS X: The Complete Reference
Author: Jesse Feiler
Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill
Published: 2001
Pages: 764
Illustrations: Monochrome
ISBN: 0072126639