In the tradition of O'Reilly's Nutshell series, this new title offers a thorough treatment of Mac OS X version 10.2, from its BSD Unix foundation to Aqua, the new user interface. The book's "Unix Command Reference" is the most complete and thorough coverage of Mac OS X Unix commands you can find anywhere. Each command and option in this section has been painstakingly tested and checked against Jaguar--even the manpages that ship with the system can't compete in accuracy. The reference incorporates the new command-line tools that come with Apple's Developer tools. It familiarizes readers with the Finder and the Dock, file management, system configuration, network administration issues, and more. Later chapters include bonus material for the Unix user, including advanced use of the Terminal and how to configure a DAMP (Darwin, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) web publishing system. Other topics covered in the book include:

• Filesystem overview
• Running Java applications
• System and Network Administration
• Directory Services and NetInfo
• Scripting on Mac OS X
• Using CVS
• Unix Command Reference
• Installing and Running X Windows and BSD Unix applications

The Gist

Mac OS X In A Nutshell is quite well structured, and organized into into 5 parts. The first is a quick overview of the Macintosh GUI. The second part, "System Configuration," is mainly devoted to getting the system running well (covering preferences, networking, the file system and Java). The third section, "System and Network Administration," is a good guide to several lower-level tasks, including an excellent chapter on directory services and NetInfo. The fourth is about development, including Apple's IDE "Project Builder" and CVS. The final part covers the Unix underpinnings of OS X and X Windows. This includes a Unix command reference of over 200 pages.

The Good

The book is also well written, with light, easily understood prose and some good screen dumps, tables and diagrams to make some of the more complex points easily understood. I appreciate the detailed contents section, good quality index and black chapter tabs at the side of each page for finding the information I need.

Everything seems to be covered, though you may sometimes find yourself needing to go elsewhere for more depth, but this is really only to expected in a book that is trying more for breadth across an entire operating system than depth in one particular area.

Despite having used and developed on a Mac for over 15 years and OS X since the late beta stage I still found myself discovering something new and useful every few pages in the book.

The Bad

The section of the book I appreciated least was the Unix Command Reference. 200 pages, most of which are adequately covered by the online man pages or a quick 'command --help'. Not that it isn't useful having this information on paper, and not that this section isn't more complete than the man pages and less error-ridden. It's just that my favourite operating system has a large number of commands that are hard to find by

name alone. Online, I tend to rely on apropos to find what I need. Back when you paid a large amount of money for a Unix license they came with hard copy manuals that included a permuted word index of the same top slug that apropos searches, which made them infinitely more useful. O'Reilly could improve the heck out of this book by giving us the same thing for what I felt was otherwise an almost totally wasted 200 pages (though I admit that the combination of the chapter on NetInfo and the command references for nicl and niutil etc. actually have me now understanding and using NetInfo well.)

Once again O'Reilly have provided a web page for the book that is mostly marketing material -- though in this case the Errata page is useful. At the bottom of the page they have a number of links to "Related O'Reilly Articles" but have only listed three by the authors of the book, leaving out, for example, X11 and Open Office on Mac OS X by Wei-Meng Lee and Configuring sendmail On Jaguar by James Duncan Davidson to name two MacDevCenter articles I've found incredibly helpful.

Conclusion

This book is not quite in the "must buy" category. If you do want a book to help you with the more technical aspects of OS X or to help you move to OS X from Unix or Windows hacking then this one is worth a serious look. It certainly better covers the technical aspects than OS X Bible and others of that style (such as the 'Missing Manual' or Robin Williams' 'Little Mac OS X Book'.) The only other volume that really compares is 'OS X Unleashed' and it has way too much coverage of the simple stuff and the various applications, is not as well structured and has a wordier, less terse and technical style. It's also more expensive and twice the size and weight.

The book purports to target power users but I think they would find it too slow and shallow for the most part and, as a reference, too disorganized. A better audience would be newcomers to Mac OS X, particularly those who want to develop for the platform and need an overview of its capabilities. For that group the book serves as a reasonable starting point, however, readers should take care not to quote facts from the book without double-checking them; some outdated material, minor inaccuracies and vague wording will most likely land them on the losing sides of arguments.

More troubling than anything else about the book are the omissions. For example, there's no discussion of virtual memory nor the annoying havoc wrought when running out of disk space corrupts "Preference files" (and how these topics are related). In the "Dotfiles" section there is no mention of the most ubiquitous dotfile of them all -- .DS_Store. Things are brought up but not described. For instance, the Ruby language is listed numerous times along with Perl, Python and others but it's missing from the chapter that describes these programming languages and it's not even in the index. This is not to say the book must discuss Ruby but if it's going to refer to it multiple times then it needs to be addressed. These point out the problem areas -- information that's simply not covered, sections that cover a topic but miss key elements, and terms and concepts the text refers to but fails to discuss.

Even with the issues described above the book still contains a lot of useful information. I've picked up a couple new things and referred back to it on occasion. But the pay-off doesn't justify the reading effort. The book needs some serious editing work to smooth out the presentation consistency, better fact checking and an eye toward precision of wording. If this were turned into a true reference book O'Reilly could publish additional volumes such as Changes for OS X 10.3, Panther and bi-monthly mini-volumes that could refer back to the base volumes. That would be a useful collection.

Consider this; while the Unix command chapter takes up nearly a quarter of the volume there's not a single mention of iTunes. This is not a general purpose Mac book. It is clearly aimed at advanced to expert user who wants to dig into the Unix underpinnings of OS X. At that it is great. The writing is clear, the explanations straightforward. It is well indexed. And it doesn't weigh 10 kg. It is an excellent addition to O'Reilly's Nutshell series, mostly aimed at programmers or system administrators.