A.P. Lawrence

Learning Unix for Mac OS X

• Dave Taylor & Brian Jepson
• O'Reilly
• 0596004702

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This is a pleasant introduction to Unix that someone just starting out with Mac OS X will find very useful. Don't bother with this if you are already experienced with Unix or Linux, but if you've never been at a Unix command line in your life, this is a good place to start.

I liked that the authors went to some effort to cover what could go wrong with the examples they used. I think it was also good that they covered Fink and a few Unixy applications like Pine.

There are bigger and more inclusive books out there, but the brevity of this (128 pages) makes it very non-threatening for the command-line phobic. The back cover states that its target audience is traditional Macintosh users, and while I don't fall into that category at all, I suspect that even the most fearful will find this to be a painless experience.

I did think it a little odd that the Apple Developer Connection considers this a "Recommended Title". While it's certainly true that developers can be just as Unix naive as anyone else, I would think that most Mac Developers would want something far more techy than this. I don't mean to imply that this is just fluff; but it definitely is just a light surface treatment and wouldn't seem to take a developer where they probably want to go. I could be wrong, of course.

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