Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual | 
| Author: David Pogue
Publisher: Pogue Press
List Price: $29.95
Buy Used: $1.95
You Save: $28.00 (93%)
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Rating:  134 reviews
Sales Rank: 17562
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 5th
Pages: 864
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.7
ISBN: 0596009410
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.4465
EAN: 9780596009410
ASIN: 0596009410
Publication Date: July 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Mint interiors, no highlighting or markings, good covers, cover design may vary
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Product Description
You can set your watch to it: As soon as Apple comes out with another version of Mac OS X, David Pogue hits the streets with another meticulous Missing Manual to cover it with a wealth of detail. The new Mac OS X 10.4, better known as Tiger, is faster than its predecessors, but nothing's too fast for Pogue and Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. There are many reasons why this is the most popular computer book of all time. With its hallmark objectivity, the Tiger Edition thoroughly explores the latest features to grace the Mac OS. Which ones work well and which do not? What should you look for? This book tackles Spotlight, an enhanced search feature that helps you find anything on your computer; iChat AV for videoconferencing; Automator for automating repetitive, manual or batch tasks; and the hundreds of smaller tweaks and changes, good and bad, that Apple's marketing never bothers to mention. Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition is the authoritative book that's ideal for every user, including people coming to the Mac for the first time. Our guide offers an ideal introduction that demystifies the Dock, the unfamiliar Mac OS X folder structure, and the entirely new Mail application. There are also mini-manuals on iLife applications such as iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto, those much-heralded digital media programs, and a tutorial for Safari, Mac's own web browser. And plenty more: learn to configure Mac OS X using the System Preferences application, keep your Mac secure with FileVault, and learn about Tiger's enhanced Firewall capabilities. If you're so inclined, this Missing Manual also offers an easy introduction to the Terminal application for issuing basic Unix commands. There's something new on practically every page, and David Pogue brings his celebrated wit and expertise to every one of them. Mac's brought a new cat to town and we have a great new way to tame it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 129 more reviews...
 The Missing manual is missing no more! July 23, 2005
M. A. Filippelli (Elk Grove, CA, US)
272 out of 278 found this review helpful
Mac OS X Tiger Edition The missing manual:
This is another outstanding book by David Pogue. This is a much easier read then most technical books that are usually fairly dry reading. This book covers everything that comes with Tiger in great and easy to follow detail with an appropriate number of images for the topic. Chapter one starts with logging into the Mac to organizing your documents to setting system preferences and troubleshooting the Mac and everything in between including Hacking your Mac. The book moves through it's chapters in a nice chronological order.
All of the applications that come with Tiger are covered in good detail. Dash board, creating widgets, Spotlight, Apple remote desktop, Sherlock, iTunes, iSync, iChat .Mac, Safari RSS for internet feeds, Automator, iDVD, iChat, iPhoto, iCal, iMic, iMovie, iDisk, iSync and iTunes, Apple Script and Image Capture to name a few.
Creating user accounts is covered along with file and directory permissions, configuring the user environment and user preferences, passwords and other elements of security.
The books also covers the various aspects of networking including Apple Talk, Rendezvous, Bonjour, IP configuration, Bluetooth, firewire devices, hubs, firewalls, terminal, SSH and routers.
The book arrived three days ago and I have been looking through the book and sitting in front of my Mac and have found that everything in the book is accurate.
For those that are coming from a Microsoft Windows environment there is a nice section on Windows keyboard commands and how they translate into Mac keyboard commands. It also covers things that you are used to seeing in Windows like Control Panel, My Computer, Network places, modem properties and other things and what their equivalents are in Mac. Basic UNIX is also covered as it applies to the terminal session. It also talks about the reasoning behind going to the Intel processor.
There are a lot of great books covering Tiger but I think that this is the best that I have seen. I pre ordered this book four months ago and it was worth the wait.
In summary this is a great book for all levels of end user for the truly novice (just came from Windows) users to the advanced user. The books intended audience is not stated but this is a book that is a 5 star book for the novice to intermediate user and a 4 star book for the advanced user.
 Helpful for Beginner and Power User alike July 27, 2005
E. Wuehler (Portland, OR)
124 out of 128 found this review helpful
Like most of the books in the Missing Manual series, this is well done, full of diagrams, pictures, and other useful information. A few of my favorite parts of the book are the sidebars. There is an occasional "Nostalgia Corner" sidebar which points out various "old way things were done" and the "new way things are done". The "Gem in the Rough" sidebars explain potentially useful, but probably not obvious, features of OS X. There are also "Power User Clinic" sidebars for the true OS X geeks.
The book does go into the iLife apps at a high level, but if you're looking for details you should check out the separate iLife (iMovie & iDVD, iPhoto, GarageBand, etc) Missing Manual books. For that matter, there are a lot of books that would do a better job getting into the nitty-gritty specifics of various applications or features (like AppleScript) of OS X - which is not the purpose of this book. This is a high level introduction to just about everything OS X can do for you.
If you're new - or relatively new - to OS X, this is definately a book I'd recommend. I've loaned it to a few of my buddies (recent "converts" to the Mac) and they've all given it a thumbs up. If you've done Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther and now Tiger - hmmm... it would be good for the new features (Spotlight, Dashboards, Automator, etc) but I wouldn't put it on my "must have" list. Definately on the "nice to have" list, though.
As always, the Mac is less work and more play (unless asked a direct question by spouse or boss, then it's all work and no play). Anyway, for grins (or groans) turn on the Speech Recognition (Chapter 15) and ask your Mac "Tell me a joke".
Very helpful for switching from PC to Mac December 6, 2005
calvinnme (Fredericksburg, Va)
73 out of 74 found this review helpful
I only recently got involved with Mac OS, when work required that I shift gears from a PC to a Mac. Therefore I am not familiar with all of the nuances between version 9 and version 10.4, which this second edition covers. In true O'Reilly fashion, however, this book smoothly got this newbie very familiar with the features of MAC OS, which I am finding to be a combination of visual elegance and the underlying stability of UNIX, adding up to a very solid operating system that, quite truthfully, I was not expecting. The book starts out explaining the user interface, and teaches some special characteristics and key combinations on Mac OS X that are not well known to most of the Mac users. There is a lengthy explanation on what is the difference between Carbon and Cocoa and how you can determine with which API an application was built. I really liked how the author drew the distinction between the Terminal and the Unix that lies underneath OS X's graphical user interface. There are also helpful sub-chapters for the new Find function and Menulets. The book explains how to use the included applications and utilities, and even goes as far as introducing AppleScript.
In Part 4 the discussion becomes more advanced, and networking and more advanced graphics and multimedia-related topics are discussed. There is even an introduction to the Terminal and Bash. I never really appreciated the power of the MAC OS in multimedia applications until I read this section of the book. Thus, I think my favorite in this section is chapter 15 on Sounds,Movies,Speech, and Handwriting. I never knew before I read this book that MAC OS had features for handwriting recognition! Part four is rounded out by a chapter on hacking MAC OS X which includes details on Tinkertool, redoing the MAC OS X graphics, and replacing the Finder Icons.
In Part Five, Mac OS X Online, there is a whole new chapter covering Sherlock 3, iChat, and iCal. Also explained in full is Mail's new spam filter and the new personal firewall. At the end of the book there is a very useful "master list" of keystroke combinations.
I recognize that most Mac power-users might not find this book valuable, but for beginning to intermediate Mac users I think it has much to say.I notice Amazon does not show a table of contents, so I include that here:
Ch. 1 Folders and Windows
Ch. 2 Organizing your stuff
Ch. 3 Spotlight
Ch. 4 Dock, desktop, and toolbar
Ch. 5 Documents, programs, and dashboard
Ch. 6 Back to Mac OS 9
Ch. 7 Moving data
Ch. 8 Automator and AppleScript
Ch. 9 System preferences
Ch. 10 The free programs
Ch. 11 CDs, DVDs, and iTunes
Ch. 12 Accounts, firewalls, and security
Ch. 13 Networking
Ch. 14 Graphics, fonts, printing, and faxing
Ch. 15 Sound, movies, speech, and handwriting
Ch. 16 Terminal : doorway to Unix
Ch. 17 Fun with Terminal
Ch. 18 Hacking Mac OS X
Ch. 19 Internet setup, .Mac, and iSync
Ch. 20 Mail and address book
Ch. 21 Safari, iChat, and Sherlock
Ch. 22 SSH, FTP, VPN, and Web sharing
Another Pogue Winner December 5, 2005
Gail Lawley (Tucson, AZ USA)
36 out of 36 found this review helpful
The Missing Manual Tiger by David Pogue
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 his Pogue's books!
 OS X Missing Manual October 7, 2005
G. Loeffler
30 out of 33 found this review helpful
Excellent for someone new to 10.4 or new to the Apple OS X system and 10.2 and lower. David is a well respected writer and does not disappoint. For those needing to have a more through understanding of OS X Tiger, you may need to wait for the second addition. I rate it a 3 because it does not go deep enough for the user already familiar with OS X. People already using X from 10.3
up should have little problems with Tiger.
For those new to OS X I give it a 5. A must have.
If your new to the Mac, this book is for you, if your new to X, this is the book for you. If your only going to have one book for X. This is it.
It will carry you from the start to finish for just about every function of Tiger.
With no re pre-release of X 10.4 Tiger the the authors of books were at a disadvantage. OS 10.4 Tiger authors had to hustle to get the books out. I bought a copy, as sometimes I can find a obscure fix or idea to a problem that could have taken a lot longer searching the web. If your an experienced user, you may want to wait for the second addition.
I give it 3 stars relating the usefulness for a user based on 1 to 5 for the skill level of the user. Easy to read, to the point, It is 1 of 2 must have Mac books the other being The Mac Bible Tiger edition.
Enjoy
Geoff
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