Great Reading: 5 Killer Books For Mac OS X.

I sometimes wonder why I’m an early Mac adopter. It’s fun, I guess. Digging into Mac OS X back when it was still a beta preview was a blast. Thought I was familiar and comfortable with Unix, Mac OS X brought much to the table that was better, but altogether different.

Not long after OS X hit the streets so did a wealth (or trail) of thick books that promised to teach you everything you wanted to know about Apple’s new candy colored Aqua operating system—candy coated on the outside, nuts and bolts you could touch and feel (at your peril) on the inside.

That scenario was made for instructive books on OS X. Here’s the five best from my personal shelf.

Mac OSX: The Missing Manual - David Pogue
How many manuals and books has this guy written? He’s a longtime Mac user and afficiando and his books show that experience.

This O’Reilly Press book has nearly 670 pages of all the information that should have been included in your Mac’s box. But wasn’t.

The flimsy Mac manual is enough to get you started out using a Mac and not much more. The Missing Manual tells you there’s plenty under the hood of Apple’s candy-coated OS.  As you’d expect, there’s the standard instruction on the Mac OS X desktop—Folders, Windows, Organization, the Dock, the Toolbar.

And, Pogue goes into sufficient detail on how to use a Mac (including a brief touch on Mac Classic—Windows users buy Macs, too) that Apple truly missed giving you a Manual. part 3 covers the basic components of Mac OS X, including all the FREE applications, from Address Book, AppleScript to the iLife applications, to System Preferences and the Utilities folder.

Pogue is a writer and a Mac user, so you’re not getting a book that’s for geeks or techno-dudes. This is the Manual for the rest of us. If you could only buy one book to give you the skinny on Mac OS X, make it The Missing Manual. Negatives? A few.

There’s just so much material that’s worthwhile in this book that it’s daunting; almost like a research book. Less than $21 at Amazon.

Mac OS X Killer Tips - Scott Kelby
If you could only afford two books, make sure to include Killer Tips. There’s not one Mac book around that offers such a digestible view of our favorite OS.

Over 300 pages make Killer Tips a substantial book (despite the many photographs of OS X and the larger print) but it delivers Mac information much differently that Pogue’s Missing Manual. Killer Tips has a killer design. Each page has two tips, one on top, one on the bottom.

The tips also carry a screenshot of the Mac OS X feature being uncovered. That makes it an easy read. Don’t be fooled by the size. The Table of Contents is 13 pages long and well organized with descriptive titles. There’s not much to complain about.

I’ve been an OS X user from the beginning and I can always find something I didn’t know or forgot that I knew. Less than $20 from Amazon.

Before moving on to the 3rd of 5 books on Mac OS X that grace my bookshelf, let me point out that I’m not getting a commission and not pushing you toward Amazon. More than half of the books I buy come from Amazon because they’re just so darned good.

The rest come from Borders with a few from the nearby Apple Store.

# 3 on my list of 5 Killer Books for Mac OS X is from SAMS, written by John Ray and William C. Ray. Read on…

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