This book is stock full of useful tips and advice on how to keep your Mac or Macs running well or in some cases more efficiently. There's tips for ipods and iphones too. If you like to do it yourself but fear doing it alone, this is the only book you need to get it done!

The "Big Book of Apple Hacks" represents the meatiest collection of Apple hacks in publication. It provides 131 hacks (and many more sidebar mini-hacks) for all current major Apple products like the computer lines, iPhone and iPod, Apple TV, and even the Mighty Mouse. There are hacks and tips for everyone, from modest skills to the highest, although most of them are for serious tinkerers and the high-end geeks who would be comfortable using the command line, Automator, and UNIX and wouldn't hesitate to crack open the boxes of each of the Apple products to perform technical surgery of some type.

Author, Chris Seibold, is an engineer and writer who makes tinkering with complexity accessible. He is assisted here by a large handful of contributors who are programmers, computer scientists, engineers, writers, and producers of various sorts.

The hacks are organized into 15 chapters, mostly by product line, both hardware and software. All are well-written, easy to follow, illustrated by (grayscale) images of photos and screenshots, and well-larded with sidebar tips and "Quick Hacks." Some of the hardware hacks are illustrated by stage-by-stage photos of hardware disassembly and reassembly.

Many of the hacks, especially the software ones, rely on third-party software and the book references many useful programs available for downloading from the Internet, most of them Open Source, free, or modestly priced. The introductory chapters cover backing up, creating a bootable flash drive, and installing the Apple-provided Developer Tools, using the root account, and modifying plists. There are hacks for the Internet like scraping the web for images using a special script (available for downloading at the author's site), cleaning metadata, Safari tips and tricks, and more. Later chapters cover customizing the Mac OS X operating system, networking and security, maximizing multiple operating systems, hacking the Apple hardware products, and adapting the Mac computer to run custom made weather monitoring systems and Smart Homes utilities.

Throughout there are hacks I've never seen before and which are quite interesting and (mostly) practical, like using Software Restore Disk on almost any Mac, no-cost alternatives to static IP addresses, sucking out an existing Windows installation to a Mac, installing the whole Wikipedia on an iPod, making a laptop cooler, installing a Mac Mini in a car, and disassembling a Mighty Mouse for cleaning.

Some hacks have been published elsewhere in some form or another, but there is no shortage of originality here, and plenty of material for serious tinkerers to deal with. The hacks here are for productivity reasons, cost-saving, and just plain curious fun. But honestly, some of these hacks are for only "Those Who Need a Life!!!" -like, the multiple ways to disable iSight camera, motion activation laptop tricks, and even running (old) Classic games on newer Macs.

I am a tinkerer. I love to play around with things, see how they work, make modifications, hack. I come by this trait honestly. My dad is an electronic tech by trade and tinkerer by nature. Dad likes to "hack" electronics. In fact, our first color television was a Heathkit that dad built himself. Dad always had a table full of electronics that he was working on bought from flea markets and ham radio shows. He always had a Popular Mechanics open to a new project. But now instead of a table of electronics, I have a Macbook. Instead of Popular Mechanics, I have The Big Book of Apple Hacks from O'Reilly.

The Big Book of Apple Hacks is indeed big. Chris Seibold (a senior writer at the Apple Matters web site) collected (with the assistant of 27 contributors) 131 hacks (and many sidebar "mini-hacks") and logically organized them into 15 chapters. The hacks range from simple software code changes to get-out-the-soldering-iron hardware mods. But all the hacks are interesting and most are useful.

Beginning with the usual admonishment to back up your file, Big Book of Apple Hacks actually goes on to show you how via hack #1. Good advise since The Big Book of Apple Hacks quickly goes into hacking .plist files, OS X (mostly Leopard), command-line, network, iPods, iPhones, laptops, even your car!

The hacks, ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages, are well laid out with clear instructions. The illustrations used provide additional clarification. Most hacks are useful and optimize your system, but a few are pretty fanciful.

The hacks in this book are not new and can be found in different forms on the web. But this collection presents these hacks in a consistent way that are easy to read and understand.

The Big Book of Apple Hacks is a real time suck, in a very good way. I can see my dad and I now spending time infrom of our Macbooks hacking away. I would recommend this book to all Mac users, but more experienced users will benefit the most.

O'Reilly is one of the premier publishers of tech books, offer discounts to members of Mac User Groups, so run, do not walk, to your group and get this book.

Macintosh equipment users and collections catering to them should consider Big Book of Apple Hacks an essential acquisition key to unlocking the power of the Apple computer. It's a new collection of tips, tricks and hacks which covers all kinds of Mac equipment, from the latest line of iPods and Apple TV to the Mac OS X. From adding devices and customizing settings to step-by-step directions to circumvent Apple controls, it's an exceptional, wonderful collection of possibilities.

The big book of apple hacks came with repeated pages. The book started at page twenty something and then started back. There are surely some pages missing. The problem is that it costs me more to try to return the book back to Amazon than to buy another book.