[ Mike submitted this reader review for Learning Unix for Mac OS X. ]

Rating: 4

A very good, basic book on Unix. It gives the beginner a good introduction to the core functions of the terminal and the command line. I had gone through Chris Stone's excellent Learning the Mac OS X Terminal series on macdevcenter.com and got my unsupported Epson 850Ne network inkjet printer working in OS X by following instructions at http://homepage.mac.com/balthisar/printing/ (which is also an excellent resource) before reading this book. I still learned quite a bit. It filled in a lot of gaps in my basic Unix knowledge. It definitely left me hungry for more, especially in the area of shell customization.

Mike D.

Mike, for more on shell customization, see Paul Dubois' book, Using csh & tcsh, available from O'Reilly. For more on vi, see Learning the vi Editor. And for more on Emacs, if you prefer, see Learning GNU Emacs. Another great book for going deeper is Unix Power Tools, which gives almost a thousand tips, pointers to useful programs, and the like--all the stuff that makes a Unix user into a power user. It's not Mac OS X-specific yet, but most of what's in there is applicable.

We also have books on sendmail, Apache, and other tools available in the Mac OS X Unix environment (see our Mac Resource Center for a complete list). And Aeleen Frisch's classic Essential System Administration will be out in a new edition in August, and will cover Mac OS X along with all the other Unix variants it normally covers (Solaris, AIX, BSD, Linux).

Tim

Got a compliment, complaint, or suggestion? Let us know!

Return to: letters.oreilly.com