David Pogue has been around for a long time writing books for the Mac. His "Mac Secrets" books (co-written with Joseph Schorr) are always a top source of information. Fortunately, "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" is right up there with the other Pogue books.

To start off, one must wonder what Apple was thinking to let something as powerful and deep as the new OS X to be released without providing any formal information. In fact, many people's primary awareness of OS X is that of Steve Jobs at MacWorld running his mouse up and down the Dock watching it expand and contract with the genie effect. Perhaps at that time there might not have been all that much to show off with OS X, but from an almost crash-proof system, built-in spell checker in TextEdit, to the ability to maintain stylized text in the clipboard, there is a lot to show off about in OS X.

Pogue does not use any fancy icons for his asides in this book, but he does have a variety of sidebar types. These include such sidebars as "Power Users' Clinic," obviously for power users, and "Frequently asked Questions" with such information as to how to identify a carbon vs a cocoa application [click an application to make it active, control-click and select Show Package Contents. Open the contents --> Resources folder that appears. Look for a file that ends with the letters .nib? If so, it's a Cocoa application. Otherwise it's Carbon.]. But these, among others, are also joined by one of my favorite items called "Gem in the Rough." In these one can get such tricks as using the Time-Zone pane of the Date&Time panel to calculate the time differences between you and other parts of the earth or how to use the File Sharing feature in System Preferences to create an instant messenger throughout an entire intranet.

One of my "tricks," used to let me know whether any book is any good, is how often I go "Gee, I didn't know that..." as I read the book. Well, since I didn't know too much about OS X, there was a lot of "Gee, I didn't know that." What occasionally would happen though, was he would discuss how something in OS X was different from OS 9 and I would learn things about OS 9 I didn't know. That's always cool.

There is a tendency with those who feel comfortable with a program to not read through a 3rd party book such as this. Rather, such a person is likely to look up specific items on a "need to know" basis. Likewise, if you've been using OS X for some time, you might be inclined to overlook the first few chapters or so as you might feel there was not much to learn. While full reading may not be necessary, skimming might not be a bad idea. In fact, I'd recommend at least skimming the entire book looking for those little jewels of information on how to use our new Mac systems.

If you are wary of Unix, but want to learn more despite these concerns, there are two chapters: Chapter 15: Terminal: The Unix Window, and Chapter 16: Fun with Terminal. Keep in mind, you DON'T NEED TO KNOW UNIX TO USE OS X. But, if you are a power user from OS 1-9, you feel kind of left out in OS X. And, if you are a Unix wuss, such as myself, you might like to know more. Although Pogue does provide some small tasty morsels, one is likely to feel somewhat confused and insecure about a variety of Terminal operations. However, this is probably good as Pogue does provide in one example that the command: <sudo rm -ri/Users/jim\Deleted> will remove a directory named for Jim, but the very same commands with an extra space <sudo rm -ri/ Users/jim\Deleted> will delete all data on all drives. Trust me, you don't want to mess around with Unix if you do not know what you are doing.

[Personal side comment: there is a program called Batchmod which can help the average user with various permissions limitations. Do not use this program willy-nilly. It's a very powerful program that can do an amazing amount of damage if you are not careful. Even if you know what you are doing, be very very careful when using this program.]

The worst thing I can mention about this book is its cover; it's stupid. I'm not talking about its being mostly white (I've added a light blue border around the scan of the book to help it's display), but what in the blazes made someone think that a sailboat was the proper image for a book about a new Mac OS? I suppose it would have made more sense to place a paddle on the cover (as in "I'm so lost in OS X I feel like I'm up the creek without a paddle") but as it is, it gets my vote for best "real bad cover" award (if there is any such thing).

The cover notwithstanding, there is a lot of great information contained therein. The book does not come with a CD. Rather, if you go to the web site you can find updates and corrections of the text and a variety of software that would have been on the CD if they had one. (Particularly I'd like to point out the Freeware program TinkerTool!) As it is, Pogue kept the price down and the site will always have the latest versions of the software. I don't know how the other "Missing Manuals" compare with this one (currently they have 8 MM titles), but if they are as good as this one is, it's a safe place to look for the book that didn't come with the software/OS.

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