View Review Details

Book:   Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual
Subject:   still the best Mac OS X manual
Date:   2008-02-01 09:58:45
From:   Allen Stenger
Rating:  StarStarStarStarStar

This is still the best Mac OS X book, both for beginners and experts. Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is mostly an incremental upgrade over the previous version, and so is this book. Leopard has hundreds of tweaks and this book covers them all.


The premier new feature in Leopard is Time Machine, a simple way to do incremental backups to a second hard drive. The book has 12 pages on Time Machine, explaining backups in general, how to set up Time Machine, and how to find and restore the backups.


Other new features include Screen Sharing (letting other Macs look at your screen and even take control for troubleshooting or demo purposes, something like the Timbuktu product), Spaces (maintain several virtual screens and switch between them - a little reminiscent of the very old program Switcher), and Quick Look (view a preview of a document without actually opening the application). All have good coverage in this book.


The Mac OS X Missing Manual series is very polished, and if you have an earlier edition of this book you won't get (or need) any additional information about older OS versions in this new edition. But you should upgrade if you are running Leopard and are puzzled by some of the features.

See larger cover

"The preeminent general reference source for Mac OS X has always been the Missing Manual Series written by David Pogue. The latest iteration in the series is its Mac OS X Leopard Edition, completely revised, and it is the biggest, most comprehensive, and most useful of all the editions in the series."
--John Suda, Slashdot.org