Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther

The stable, adaptable Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X surely have contributed to the operating system's fantastic success in the market. The trouble for the Mac loyal, though, is that nothing could be further removed from the friendly Mac user interface than the Unix shell environment. There's a learning curve to be surmounted by Mac users who want to get the most out of their new System, and that's where Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther comes into the picture. It's an introductory Unix and shell-scripting text tailored to the specificities of Mac OS X, suitable for someone who's never worked with Unix before.

Because the capabilities of the Unix shell are vast, the authors devote many pages to showing how key commands (like ls and chmod) work in the most commonly encounter scenarios. More usefully (because Unix help screens explain the basics pretty well by themselves), they carefully explain a lot of recipes that solve problems everyone encounters--like the fact that Unix and many Mac applications encode the line breaks in text files differently. The authors' style consistently succeeds in communicating both facts about Unix and a sense of adventure about what you can do with it. This is a real treasure for anyone wanting to get the most out of the latest Mac OS. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to use the Unix operating system that underlies Mac OS X. Specifically, the authors show how to manage files, edit text with pico and vi, print text and graphics, and connect to the Internet. Special coverage shows how to explore the large assortment of open-source software suited to the Mac.