Comments about oreilly Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther:

In general this book is quite good. Matisse Enzer's Peachpit title "Unix on OS X" (or something like that) would be a good companion.

I wasn't too thrilled with the organization of the content: customizing your shell and editing environment variables seems like appendix material for the kind of user this book is geared to, not Chapter 1 contents. And an entire chapter on printing seems a bit much; new Unix users are almost certainly going to be printing using the good old Mac UI.

And one little gotcha that turned out to be quite important for me: bash is not the default shell in Panther if you've upgraded from Jaguar as I did. In that case tcsh is. Might be worth including this in future editions (although I guess there will be fewer and fewer of us upgraders as time goes on...)

Comments about oreilly Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther:

(posted in response to another review)

Ed, I'm very sorry that the book disappointed you. However, I'd ask you to give it another chance, but be sure to think about the goals of the book that are spelled out on the back cover (see http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunixpanther/desc.html). I really do think we accomplished the goals that we set out to with this book, although it sounds like it's not what you were looking for. As far as the coverage of sudo, please see p12, 48, and 54-55, where we have a section on the command. I'm sorry that you missed that the first time through, but please do give this book another look. Or, if this just isn't the book for you, you may want to look at Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, which will be out soon. This one goes a lot further than the Learning Unix book.

Comments about oreilly Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther:

Other than terminal session telecommunications 18 years ago I have had no real terminal type training and was anticipating an introduction to the terminal and some useful UNIX commands for everyday use in OS X. I am sorry to report that while this book does a good job introducing you to the terminal, that's all it really does. Doing things like reading your email in the terminal is something so arcane that no mac user would do more than once as a silly test. Too much space devoted to it and other silly things. The title is Learning Unix for OS X, not "a couple generic UNIX commands" I was hoping for a handbook, a reference list of basic useful commands for REAL OS X needs. I will give you a perfect example. Every OS X user has heard of permissions and many have experienced the need to fix them. Most people don't know that you can do it in Disk Utility and download applications (some free, most not) that will do it. I have since learned (from another source) the ridiculously simple commands that will envoke disk utility to do it (using the 'sudo' command that isn't even in the book, c'mon) without opening windows and pushing buttons. I don't want to diminish the author of the utility Cocktail's profits but users can do everything that program does easily using the terminal. That would be "Learning UNIX for OS X". I would rethink the content, leave out the stuff no one would ever use and add some realworld goodies. This is effectively chapter one, I was done in twenty minutes, and $20. is too much, I expected a wee bit more from O'Reilly.