View Review Details
| Book: |
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Learning Unix for Mac OS X |
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Learning Unix for Mac OS X Review |
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2002-05-21 09:15:44 |
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Anthony T.
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This book was hyped a lot so maybe I expected a whole lot more, but I have to agree with previous reviewer, Martin Simoneau: This book is only a (VERY) brief introduction. I really don't feel that I got all that much more from this book than I got from O'Reilly's "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" (which is a fantastic). In fact, most of the first four chapters of this book tell me much of the same thing as "The Missing Manual" command line and terminal chapters. Since you can get most of this information, if not more, for free off the Net, why would I pay 20 bucks for it?
A chapter on "Customizing the Terminal Window" is a waste of space (plus, it's in "The Missing Manual"). Any Mac user that can't find the preferences menu and mess around with fonts and colors to get things the way they like, shouldn't be messing with the command line (IMHO).
I did expect a little more explanation about the "in's and out's" of going into the Unix command line to customize my Mac... like a bunch of the articles that are on O'Reilly now. Things like sending e-mail via the command line and surfing the web are all but useless to me... why would I send mail that way when the Mac GUI is so wonderfully easy to use? Another chapter is on accessing the Internet via TelNet... hardly secure in this day and age, but the book only spends a paragraph on security... how about some space devoted to configuring Unix's firewall? So that makes another two of the 10 chapters of this book essentially useless (at least for me, and I would imagine, most Mac users).
The last chapter "Where to go from here" tells me about the Unix's "man" (manual) command (which is in "The Missing Manual") and ends up being just a plug to go to oreilly.com and sign up for the pay services.
What's left is a chapter on command line printing (6), a chapter on redirecting I/O (7) and a chapter on multitasking (9)... hardly worth 20 bucks!
I guess that I am just disappointed because I expected a lot more.... at least since many consumers will buy this book, as I did, based on the quality of "MacOS X: The Missing Manual".
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