The Macintosh Bible Book

To listen to some Macintosh fans, you'd think they take the title of The Macintosh Bible literally. Their fondness for their computers can verge on zealotry. It's easy to understand why, though: the latest Macs are the best ever, capable of handling home computing with style and business computing efficiently. Macs, as they always have, also excel at specialized work with publications and graphics. The Macintosh Bible introduces its readers to the full range of modern Macs' capabilities, leaving them well prepared to buy, configure, use, and troubleshoot their computers. Clifford Colby and Marty Cortinas aren't as good as some other Mac writers at conveying the liveliness of the Mac-user culture--authors David Pogue and Robin Williams excel in that area--but they and their collaborators have done a great job of compiling facts, procedures, and ideas about Macs and their software.For a how-to book, this one is unusually dense with text, and that's a good thing. After all, most aspects of Macs are pretty easy to figure out unaided, so it stands to reason that when you turn to a book for help you'll want the kind of detailed explanations that the authors provide here. There's lots of information on the history of Mac products, as well as peripherals offered by third-party vendors. Procedural details about how to do work in Mac OS X and other programs are right on, though more information about the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X would be nice (there's hardly any, a characteristic typical of most recent Mac books). Background information about, for instance, how database management programs work also helps novices and intermediate users gain familiarity with the Mac environment. --David Wall Topics covered: How to use a modern Macintosh computer, at a level suitable for someone new to Macs or moderately experienced with them. Coverage of hardware options, third-party software, productivity tools, utilities, and local area networks (LANs) is nice, though there's little coverage of AppleScript, Cocoa, or other programming subjects.Read More