Comments about TidBITS Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, 2nd Edition:

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac is one of three books by Joe Kissell about taking care of your Mac. The others are Take Control of Trouble Shooting Your Mac, and Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac. Together these books provide the information you need to care for your Mac.

I recommend that you read Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac first. It is basic and may reduce your need for the other two.

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac does not prescribe what you must do. It provides you with the information you need to decide what you want to do knowing the advantages and disadvantages of all the options available.

Joe Kissell urges you to create a maintenance plan, and a schedule that you will follow to make sure it gets done. He advises you to start on the right foot by installing the latest software and cleaning out "cruft."

Joe Kissel says, "The term 'cruft' is hacker slang for digital detritus obsolete, extraneous, or otherwise useless files that have accumulated over time and now do nothing but take up space. By removing cruft, you can recover valuable disk space, increase the speed of backups, file searches, upgrades, and disk diagnostics, and reduce the chance of software conflicts."

He warns you about items not to touch. Everything is written in language that we can understand in an informal manner that is easy to read.
Where experts hold different of opinions, Joe Kissel has invited different experts to express them. Six experts provided their opinions of the importance of removing cruft.

There are chapters about daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, and yearly tasks. There is also a chapter about things you have heard about that you might never need to do.

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac ends with a listing of resources where you can learn more, and a "Periodic Task Checklist of Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly Tasks."

I recommend it for every Mac user who does not now have their own plan and schedule for maintaining their Mac.

Comments about TidBITS Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, 2nd Edition:

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac provides a series of steps and activities that can done on a peri­odic basis to prevent slowdown and/or crashes of your OSX based computer. The book lives up to its promise of providing a clear, concise and straightfor­ward approach that explains why to carry out particu­lar routines, what their impact is and assembles these into programmes to be carried out on a daily, weekly and yearly basis. The book is brief, but concise and provides copious references for further explanation or discussion along with links to applications to auto­mated most of the processes.

The target audience for this volume would be indi­viduals new to OSX and the Mac looking for a smooth and secure computing relationship. This is the second edition of the book and it is current as of writing. The advice is sound and prudent and where the author senses that there might be some room for debate he solicits advice from others and shares their comments. I would recommend this volume to novice users. As the author states, he has authored similar volumes on troubleshooting and on optimising OSX and more advanced users might well be directed towards these. All of the volumes are short and directed towards the specific stated intent. They are priced accordingly and would well form a fine bundle priced at three for the price of two.