Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks

Brian Jepson

1 Do NOT buy this book if you are a
This book is a disjointed collection of largely irrelevant information. Here are some examples that reflect the general spirit of the book:

A quote from chapter 1, "Inside the terminal":
> iTerm's contextual menu consists of the following items: New Tab (which
> allows you to choose a session from the bookmarks), Browser (which opens
> the selected URL in your default web browser), Mail (which opens a
> compose mail window with the selected email address as the recipient),
> Copy, Paste, Save, Print, Print Selection, Select All, Clear Buffer, Close, and
> Configure.

You'd hope O'Reilly fired the editor.

Chapter 1 also teaches us how to use the backslash to escape spaces within filenames, and how to use escape sequences to set the title of the terminal window.

Chapter 2, "Startup", explains the OS X boot process. The impression I got from this chapter was that the authors don't understand said boot process and instead regurgitated a list of steps the computer goes through while booting. This chapter also teaches us how to use cron to schedule tasks.

Chapter 3, "Directory Services", gives us (of all things) example C code for retrieving a user's encrypted password, alongside information on managing users and their home directories.

It doesn't really get any better in the following chapters. If I was forced to say something positive about this book, I'd say that it touches many topics briefly to give you an idea of the things you can tinker with in OS X. [...] Or skip the part where you look at the table of contents -- I mean, you already know you can run X11 on OS X, right? So google for "os x x11", and you'll get much more comprehensive and concise information.

2 Very good for basic understanding of OS X' Unix background
I think the book is a good source for the first things you need to know when turning to the Unix features of Mac OS X. It's kind of a collection of everything you would use valuable time to look for elsewere.

3 Highly Recomment
Having recently bought a Powerbook 17" I wanted to indeed bridge the UNIX and Windows world. How better to do that than going Apple? I've got MS programs, pretty GUI and, the best, based on UNIX. So... Going from FreeBSD to a Mac I needed a manual and this book does it best IMHO. It's has a plethora of links to open source and some shareware, howto's, links to more info and is fairly broad. It does presuppose a working knowledge of UNIX and is targeted to an audience who is switching from a Linux/BSD OS to a Mac. While the transition is somewhat seamless, the Apple folks did some things a bit differently and that's where this book can, and does, help. Anywho, enough rambling. It's a great little book/help and should be on a UNIX person's desktop if converting from, say, Linux/FreeBSD to a Mac.

4 Power & Beauty!
I really enjoyed this book, it's a treasure trove of information throughout. Generally speaking Mac's goal is to keep things simple and the majority Mac user's are perfectly content with that. I would even say that most Mac users I've met don't care to learn UNIX. That's a shame, they don't know what they are missing! The only reason that I became interested in Mac is that it now has the power of a stable, mature and secure operating system, UNIX! Apple has the best of both worlds, the power of the UNIX OS and the beauty of the Mac interface.

With Mac's simple approach, sometimes it can be difficult to get techinical details. For a technical person, this book is welcome. But I wouldn't consider this book to be overly "geeky." Anyone with some experience with UNIX could find useful information in these pages. For example, did you know that you can use GIMP (a very powerful free image editor program) as your default image editor for iPhoto? You can use a lot of cool, free, open source software with Mac OS X. That's another good reason to learn alittle UNIX! This book goes into a lot of detail on how to install GNU free software and other packages.

The book is divided into 4 Parts: Part I. Getting Around, Part II. Building Applications Part III. Working with Packages Part IV. Serving and System Management. Then there's a lengthy Appendix on the file system, command line tools and missing manpages. In a nutshell the book starts with general information, then covers Networking and Programming topics. A good place to start is to find the Terminal Application in the Utilites folder and drag it to the Dock for quick access. I'm more of a network guy than a programmer, so naturally I gravitated to the networking chapters. But to tap into the full power of UNIX one must be able to edit and write some scripts too. This book has some practical scripting examples. It also touches on using your Mac OS X client as a server. I'm sure that I'll be refering back to this book, it's a good one to have in the library.

5 Please explain ...
As a would-be "switcher" still waiting for the 3 GHz Mac and a
mainstream OSX book from amazon, I've found myself on foreign soil with this book. What is the Dock, what is "rootless mode", what is a disk image? What does it mean to open a directory?

I'd like to suggest that you add a few pages of explanations of Mac specific things for those poor Unix souls who have seen the light but haven't yet received their new toys, and for those who are just evaluating the brightness of the light before they jump.

M Somogyi

6 Great resource for both Mac and Unix users!
With an existing knowledge of *nix based operating systems I was easily engaged and enchanted by the idea of converting from a Unix based machine such as those produced by Sun Microsystems to an Apple. I found that there is great interoperability between Mac and *nix based software applications. The idea of running the Aqua interface over BSD's skeleton sounds like a nice fit with it's Mac ease of use and it's powerful *nix processing and configurability. The book focused quite a bit on the commands and flags associated with Unix but with the Mac twist. There was also a great chapter on third party applications shipped/available for Mac OS X and pointed out key elements of the titles. Overall I would have to recommend this book to both advanced Mac users as well as the Unix enthusiast.

7 Makes a Mac Attractive
For many years, Mac and unix users lived in parallel universes. The operating systems were totally different and the fans of either tended to hark from different fields.

Well, ever since Apply redid its Mac to use the Mach kernel, now a Mac runs a dialect of unix. No less inferior than any other version. In some ways, this book is interesting in how it caters to the unix crowd. The book has numerous screen captures of the OS X UI. It sure is pretty! Even unix geeks ought to appreciate this.

Graphics-wise, perhaps the closest overlap of the unix and Mac experiences comes in the book's chapter on X Windows [=X11]. Most unix versions use X11 to implement their GUIs. The chapter shows the X11 treatment on the Mac to be very seamless. Though the Mac actually uses Quartz to make its GUI, an X11 development kit is provided, that will satisfy any X11 developer.

Unix is distinguished from traditional Mac or Microsoft OSes by emphasising a command line, and very powerful utilities that are often accessed via this command line. Panther gives you most of the common unix utilities in this customary environment.

Overall, unix fans might like this book for its presentation of a very cohesively integrated system that is perhaps easier to use than any other unix or linux offering.

8 Excellent content, well written and edited
This second edition is a substantial upgrade in both content, and clarity of prose. The technical depth that was a little overwhelming in the second section has been smoothed over and some parts have been moved out of the core of the book and into the appendices.

The unique value of the book is in it's ability to anticipate and answers the questions of Unix users who are looking to migrate to OS X, and in that it performs very well. Ever question I had in moving from Linux to OS X is answered in this well-organized work.

The book starts with the Terminal and how it can be tweaked or even replaced. It then covers the unique startup and directory services. Other user level services and applications are covered, but I liked the last section on third party tools the best. That chapter alone would have saved me a lot of time before I bought the book. The second section covers building applications on the unix layer and this edition adds a chapter on Perl which is excellent. The coverage of Fink, which is a critical, if poorly named, tool for OS X has been greatly improved in this edition. The fourth section, on databases, is well-written and is a nice-to-have to for readers, but it probably not exactly in line with the book as it's not significantly different with OS X.

If you are switching from any unix to OS X you will find this book a well written and invaluable accelerators to get out over the hump of getting the right tools and finding what and where to tweak.