Rating: 

1) there is no man page for Perl! How can O'Reilly, the publisher of all things Perl, leave out a basic man page for Perl on the highest volume Perl shipping platform ever in history, Mac OS X? This is unbelievable.

2) there is the worst man page for Awk ever given. It lists one or two options. It should at least be Brian Kernighan's own page which is a nice summary of the language. A full man page is given for the rarely used bc (binary calculator) -- which is nice don't get me wrong -- but why give a bc page with great detail and NOT do the same for the most useful utility in the system (awk), or the most used utility (perl).

The first half of the book is interesting, but should be in the "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" book. I'd like to see Awk and Perl treated with some dignity and respect and put with all of the man pages alone in a separate volume, tiny print, thin Bible paper, in a ultra-cool pocket reference that would really fit in a standard shirt pocket.

Also, the authors do not know Macintosh history very well. They say that AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) was introduced in Mac OS 8.5. Try Mac OS 6! There are quite a few other technical flaws, and a few very bad grammatical errors due to words being caught by spell checkers, but not by decent proof readers.

My advice? Wait for a 2nd edition that fixes these fundamental flaws.