Rating: 

Just the Appendixes C and D make this book worth the price...They tell Mac (Appendix C) and Windows (D) folks where things are in Tiger versus their previous operating system.

It covers the new features in detail: Spotlight - what’s the keyboard shortcut to open spotlight; how to search when you only know part of a word (usable also in text edit). He explains how to set preferences, how to keep certain items private, changing sort order, etc. Then he goes on to explain how to use the Find command (you can do much more detailed searching using Find).

Dashboard is another new Tiger feature that is covered in great detail. Dashboard is triggered by pushing the F12 key, but I have a laptop and F12 is the eject key, However by holding down the Fn key AND F12 I can open Dashboard. Did you know that you can refresh widgets by holding command and clicking R, open more than one copy of a widget and open the widget bar with the command = keystroke? Each of the 14 standard widgets are described in detail. He mentions a shareware program that will let you have a widget open while you’re using another program. Do you share your computer? Learn how and where to install widgets so they’re available to everyone, or just to you!

Another major item Apple features in Tiger is Automator. This lets you build a series of actions just by dragging tiles in the right order. Remember AppleScript that let you build instructions for a repetitive task? This is a simpler version. For the average user, one of the more useful actions might be in Safari to get text from a web page, or make a list of all the URLs from a web page, or the combine PDF files.

Security has been improved. Don’t know what a firewall is, let alone how to configure it? Pogue explains this is layman’s terms. Don’t know what the Root account is? Don’t mess with it, but understand it and learn how to activate/deactivate it ( it comes on page 455. Need to understand permissions and be sure they’re set correctly -he has pages of data on how to do this. During a download, when Tiger says “this contains an application, do you want to continue?” you can expand that box to see what program it refers to, thus preventing spyware from being downloaded. In addition, if you are installing, it will also ask for permission. In addition to the Secure Empty Trash, Disk Utillity can super erase ALL free disk space. Don’t want the people who share your computer to see where you’ve been surfing (make that present a surprise), turn on Private Browsing in the Safari menu before you begin.

Since this book is over 800 pages, I can’t review all of it for you. However, I find it an INDISPENSIBLE Macintosh tool. I always find the answer I need in Pogue’s books!