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Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks
If you're one of the many Unix developers drawn to Mac OS X for its Unix core, you'll find yourself in surprisingly unfamiliar territory. Unix and Mac OS X are kissing cousins, but there are enough pitfalls and minefields in going from one to another that even a Unix guru can stumble, and most guides to Mac OS X are written for Mac aficionados. For a Unix developer, approaching Tiger from the Mac side is a bit like learning Russian by reading the Russian side of a Russian-English dictionary. Fortunately, O'Reilly has been the Unix authority for over 25 years, and in Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks , that depth of understanding shows.This is the book for Mac command-line fans. Completely revised and updated to cover Mac OS X Tiger, this new edition helps you quickly and painlessly get acclimated with Tiger's familiar-yet foreign-Unix environment. Topics Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks is the ideal survival guide for taming the Unix side of Tiger. If you're a Unix geek with an interest in Mac OS X, you'll find this clear, concise book invaluable.
395 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 28, 2022
It was very good, but is probably out of date
April 4, 2008
I got this book because it was $3 and O'Reilly doesn't seem to have an updated version coming out anytime soon, so I might as well use SOMETHING. This book is a very weird amalgam of parts: I wanted information as a Unix Geek *User*, but a lot of the information in here is geared towards the Unix Geek *Developer*: there's a ton of information in here on package formats and the like, which is great if you're porting applications, but 99% of the time, I'm not.
What I was hoping for was a book that told me about the "weirdnesses" compared to, say, a "standard" Linux distribution ("vm_stat" vs "memstat", for example) and/or the command-line goodies (like Spotlight). And you definitely get some of that, although Leopard (10.5) is pretty dramatically different from Tiger (10.4), so a significant amount of information is out-of-date (no QuickLook, NetInfo is dead, X11 is noticeably different, etc). But I don't have any better understanding of, say, 'scutil' or 'pmset' (or the bigger framework that they fit into) than when I picked up the book. Which is a shame.
I have to agree with the other big criticism of the book that I've run across, which is that if you already know what item Z is, then this book does a good job of explaining it to you, but if you don't know it, it's not so good.
I guess I really wanted something for a user in-between n00b and wizened guru, and this book wasn't it.
What I was hoping for was a book that told me about the "weirdnesses" compared to, say, a "standard" Linux distribution ("vm_stat" vs "memstat", for example) and/or the command-line goodies (like Spotlight). And you definitely get some of that, although Leopard (10.5) is pretty dramatically different from Tiger (10.4), so a significant amount of information is out-of-date (no QuickLook, NetInfo is dead, X11 is noticeably different, etc). But I don't have any better understanding of, say, 'scutil' or 'pmset' (or the bigger framework that they fit into) than when I picked up the book. Which is a shame.
I have to agree with the other big criticism of the book that I've run across, which is that if you already know what item Z is, then this book does a good job of explaining it to you, but if you don't know it, it's not so good.
I guess I really wanted something for a user in-between n00b and wizened guru, and this book wasn't it.
October 27, 2008
OK, so on one hand this is a thinly veiled attempt to make OS X more like a real Unix (oh wait, I forgot, OS X is real unix...?) Since that can never really happen smoothly, this book fails in any attempt, I think, in convincing a harcore *nix geek that OS X is a suitably flexible unix system.
However, for an OS X geek trying to get over into hardcore *nix, this is a pretty good transitional work. You can pick up a lot about unix from this book, and graduate to a proper Linux book and system afterwards.
However, for an OS X geek trying to get over into hardcore *nix, this is a pretty good transitional work. You can pick up a lot about unix from this book, and graduate to a proper Linux book and system afterwards.
July 14, 2008
This book is truth in advertising. Sadly, books like these do not stand the test of time, due to the rapidly changing nature of technology.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews