BBEdit 4 for Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide)

For a long time, Mac programmers have favored Bare Bones software's BBEdit text editor for the Macintosh as a source-code editor. Now the software has gained new life as an HTML editor for producing Web documents. In fact, the latest release of this venerable program contains plenty of extras that speed HTML generation.

BBEdit 4 for Macintosh teaches a beginner how to use BBEdit to create, modify, and save text files on Macintosh computers. Author Mark Bell starts by showing you how to install BBEdit, open files with it, and perform basic text-editing tasks. He explains how to search and then dispenses a crash course in HTML syntax and gets into BBEdit's HTML-editing extensions. Web publishing is a major thrust of this book, occupying about a third of its pages. Toward the end, Bell exposes the rudiments of scripting with Frontier and AppleScript.

Throughout, Bell's descriptive prose and concise step-by-step procedures are backed up by copious illustrations--practically every paragraph has a screen shot next to it. The illustrations look small until you realize that they're absolutely readable; you're left wondering why the pictures in most computer books are so huge.

This book could best be improved by the inclusion of the BBEdit Lite software, which is available as shareware on the Web. (Currently, this book is not accompanied by a disk.)