Rating: 

Lately I've spent a lot on O'Reilly books and some seem pretty good (vi, emacs). I will certainly think twice about buying another.

I thought O'Reilly himself recently said in an interview that they only write books if they don't see a good pre-existing book on the topic - well, based on that, I expected the authors to do a lot more research on OSX and write a book about it.

Something which would explain some of the UNIX oddities of MacOSX. Just a few of the things which would not be in a general UNIX text. The only useful MacOSX information I can see is how to set up my printer as lpr. Not that interesting to me, but it appears to be there.

Maybe some information which is not easily available through a Google search. Or, something which does not appear to be cut and pasted straight from other O'Reilly books.

This tiny book is just a terribly brief re-hash of other OReilly UNIX primer material. Tiny is wonderful if it's dense and useful, like Strunk and White, but this book still manages to incorporate a lot of uninteresting UNIX features which will never be used, while not delving into any of the Nextstep/Openstep/MacOSX features/issues which may not be well documented already by Apple.

By all means use the free Apple documentation instead, search Google for articles about features which insterest and mystify you on OSX. Search Google on how to use man pages and then use them for details.

Perhaps buy a full size UNIX guide from O'Reilly or whoever. I can't recommend this book to any imaginable target audience.

- Ian