Reviews for Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks: Apple Developer Connection Recommended Title

1. OS X for Unix hackers ...

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2004

   I recently bought myself a 12" iBook for two reasons - firstly to see if Mac OS X is as good as it's cracked up to be (it is) and secondly to have a fiddle with the UNIX underpinnings of the system.

   I've been developing Linux software for over 10 years, so I'm fairly familiar with how various UNIXes work, but after a few hours of fiddling and trying to get various bits of my software to compile on the iBook I came to realise that although MacOS X is based on Mach/FreeBSD, Apple have decided to do things a little differently.

   This is where 'MacOS X Panther for Unix Geeks' comes in.

   As the title suggests, this isn't really a beginners book as it assumes some knowledge of UNIX and, particularly, that the reader is comfortable with a command line interface. Whilst the book does cover the performance of certain tasks using the Aqua GUI, it's often quicker to do things from the command line, and to their credit the authors realise this.

   The book's contents cover a wide variety of topics, including system administration (creating/deleting users), basic networking and the setting up of internet services (ssh, FTP etc.). More interesting from my point of view were the chapters on software development which covered Apple's version of the X Windows system, the Fink software collection (uses the package management system from Debian Linux and provides a whole load of stuff that Linux hackers will be familiar with, precompiled for OS X) and the differences between Apple's version of gcc and the versions that Linux users may be more familiar with - given the assorted 'gotchas' associated with porting from Linux to OS X, this last part alone makes the book worth the money.

   A definite return to form for O'Reilly and highly recommended for Unix/Linux users who've 'made the switch' to a Mac. Not so good for beginners who'd probably be better off with 'Running Mac OS X Panther' instead.

   Even so, given that Apple have named versions of OS X after big cats (Puma, Jaguar, Panther and the forthcoming Tiger), why do O'Reilly put dogs on the cover of their MacOS X books? :-)