The Most Useful UNIX Guide for Mac OS X Users Ever, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples!

Beneath Mac OS^® X's stunning graphical user interface (GUI) is the most powerful operating system ever created: UNIX^®. With unmatched clarity and insight, this book explains UNIX for the Mac OS X user—giving you total control over your system, so you can get more done, faster. Building on Mark Sobell's highly praised A Practical Guide to the UNIX System, it delivers comprehensive guidance on the UNIX command line tools every user, administrator, and developer needs to master–together with the world's best day-to-day UNIX reference.

This book is packed with hundreds of high-quality examples. From networking and system utilities to shells and programming, this is UNIX from the ground up—both the "whys" and the "hows"—for every Mac user. You'll understand the relationships between GUI tools and their command line counterparts. Need instant answers? Don't bother with confusing online "manual pages": rely on this book's example-rich, quick-access, 236-page command reference!

Don't settle for just any UNIX guidebook. Get one focused on your specific needs as a Mac user!

A Practical Guide to UNIX^® for Mac OS^® X Users is the most useful, comprehensive UNIX tutorial and reference for Mac OS X and is the only book that delivers

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you'll actually need to perform

• Deeper insight, based on the authors' immense knowledge of every UNIX and OS X nook and cranny

• Practical guidance for experienced UNIX users moving to Mac OS X

• Exclusive discussions of Mac-only utilities, including plutil, ditto, nidump, otool, launchctl, diskutil, GetFileInfo, and SetFile

• Techniques for implementing secure communications with ssh and scp—plus dozens of tips for making your OS X system more secure

• Expert guidance on basic and advanced shell programming with bash and tcsh

• Tips and tricks for using the shell interactively from the command line

• Thorough guides to vi and emacs designed to help you get productive fast, and maximize your editing efficiency

• In-depth coverage of the Mac OS X filesystem and access permissions, including extended attributes and Access Control Lists (ACLs)

• A comprehensive UNIX glossary

• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence

• And much more, including a superior introduction to UNIX programming tools such as awk, sed, otool, make, gcc, gdb, and CVS

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

A great reference - 2007-11-23
Reviewer Rating:
I got this book as someone who had used UNIX before, but this was many years ago, and I had forgotten a lot. This book is great for picking up the functionalities of various UNIX tools - the explanations are clear and concise. It also works very well as a quick reference. The bulk of the book is devoted to bringing you up from a potentially zero-experience user to someone who can work with ease with editors, shells, and more. Simple examples are included throughout. The back of the book has a 250-page command reference section for quickly looking up how to use a particular command. You could read the whole book and progressively work with UNIX as a self-taught course, or just reference the sections you need.

Excellent - 2007-05-06
Reviewer Rating:
I have several of Mark Sobell's Unix based books and this one is as good as the others which are all excellent. You don't nessecarily need all of them but they are truly tailored to the platform and are a quick way to get to what's important when a new platform presents itself.

If you want to know the underlying MAC, this is for you.

Very useful - 2008-07-08
Reviewer Rating:
Very useful for someone who wants to learn to use Unix on the Mac and has prior knowledge of command line languages.

Excellent resource - 2009-09-18
Reviewer Rating:
My first attempt at learning UNIX. Well-written overview with many pearls.
I would highly recommend it to others seeking to understand the basis for Mac OS X.

Excellent intro and reference. - 2009-08-27
Reviewer Rating:
This is a solid introduction and reference book for folks who are GUI-literate but not UNIX folks. (I learned UNIX back around 1982 and have desperately tried to ignore it since.) Much more useful than a general UNIX or Linux book, because it includes the specific aspects of OS X that you need to know about: where things are put, what special utilities are available, how the file system is laid out, OS X system management, etc.

The only significant complaint I have is that the book devotes a LOT of space to vim, emacs, and other pure-text editors. The terminal is fine when you need it, but why would you edit text in a non-GUI environment? If you are a serious programmer, you'll want to work in an IDE (integrated development environment) with syntax coloring, hints, debug, etc. These chapters seem like a waste of time.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Operating Systems

Sub-Categories:
Operating Systems > Macintosh OS