On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 06:27 PM, Heather Madrone wrote:
I just bought it about a week ago, and have read about half of it so far. Its focus really is on the parts of OS X/Darwin that are different from other Unix distributions, and it's pretty OK all in all. There's a good discussion on plists and Netinfo, but the book also says that Netinfo is going away in favor of traditional /etc files so I'm not sure how useful that will be in even the short run. There's a big chunk on running X Windows if that's something you want to do, and it covers Fink. There seems to be a lot of "Here's 2 pages of Unix commands that OS X supports" without going into a lot of detail on exactly what they do.... I guess you should read the man pages, but if I wanted to read the man pages I wouldn't have bought the book.Does anyone have _Mac OS X for Unix Geeks_ (O'Reilly, US $24.95) by Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman? It has a great title, but I've had mixed experiences with O'Reilly books. If you have it or have seen it, is it worth the money?
Is it interesting and informative? Yes. Would my OS X life be eternally impoverished if I didn't read it? No. Most importantly, would I shell out the $24.95 again? Well, yeah, probably, but then I'm not really that knowledgeable about Unix (I know more than some, less than most). If I were a REAL Unix Guru (with Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.) I don't think the book would have been worth it.
Hope this helps, and congrats on getting your development environment moved over. :-)
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Gary Blackburn
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
