Take Control of Panther, Volume 1 (Take Control of Panther)

Rating:
Summary: It's a UNIX machine
Review: The authors offer you a very focused book, on various aspects of running a Mac OS X Panther, or upgrading to it. But you need little or even no experience as a Mac sysadmin. The book implicitly acknowledges that some of you may be total newbies. Nothing wrong with that.

If you are indeed new to a Mac, you may enjoy the section on users and accounts. Because the Mac is now a full unix machine. With unix's core multiuser capabilities that has been refined over 20 years by other vendors. The section shows Apple's UI that gives you, as root, a very intuitive handle on many common sysadmin tasks. In this respect, the book totally deprecates using a terminal to perform those tasks. Which is the direction that traditional unix sysadmins come from. But this is an introductory book, and the authors want to get you up and running as soon as possible.

Along these lines, there is no discussion on using the Mac as a programming environment. (No mention of compilers.) But this may well await future books in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Tight & Concise, Not one of those 1,000 page books.
Review: This book is really four short books printed together:

First Joe Kissel does Upgrading to Panther.
Then MazAtt Neuburg takes over with Customizing Panther.
Kirk McElhearn discusses Users & Accounts in Panther.
Finally Glenn Fleishman covers Sharing Files in Panther.
Adam and Tonya Engst - They are the publisher and editor in chief of the "Take Control" series of books.

This is not one of those huge thousand page computer books that cost sixty bucks. Instead this is a rather small, 262 page book that is tight and concise and much less expensive. It's intent is to tell you what you need to know to get the most out of panther without having pages full of descriptions that you won't read. Instead nearly every page has insights that help you get the task done quickly and efficiently.

Rating:
Summary: Practical advice, especially on File Sharing
Review: This is high quality power user tips book for Panther. In particular the coverage of File Sharing between Macs, from Mac to PC, and over file sharing networks, is in-depth and excellent. Problem is that it's too short. If this is volume one I think they should have written volume two and put it in this book as well. The book just doesn't stand up to one of O'Reilly's in-depth Mac OSX books like Mac OS X in a Nutshell. That book doesn't cover specific topics, like File Sharing, in as much depth, but it does cover all of OS X and not just a small section like this book.