A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Authors: Mark Sobell; http://www.sobell.com Peter Seebach Prentice Hall PTR http://www.prenhallprofessional.com Booksite: http://www.phptr.com/title/0131863339 Released: December 21, 2005. Pages: 1,056 $40 USD, $56 CND, £29 GBP  35€ EUR ISDN: 0131863339 Requirements: Mac OS X Tiger. Intended for beginners. Strengths: Covers all the UNIX bases. Weaknesses: One page missing (page 477).

A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users by Mark Sobell and Peter Seebach isn’t really shovelware from UNIX on other platforms, even though it may appear to be, especially if you have read Mark Sobell’s other books on Linux and UNIX. This has to be because he enlisted the help of Peter Seebach. Thank you Mark, for adding him to the editorial staff on this book!

This book takes the strengths of UNIX and Linux background experiences and applies them to the UNIX inherent in Mac OS X Tiger. It is rather telling that in Appendix C there is only a 2-page “difference in behavior” section between “features and quirks” between Apple’s version of UNIX and the rest of the UNIX world, such as lack of case sensitivity, three development APIs of Cocoa, Carbon and BSD UNIX,  handling metadata, using sudo  instead of using su to get to root, the way it works with X Windows among others.

You cannot honestly go through this book in one sitting. It isn’t designed for a quick-read. It appears to be more along the lines of a textbook, because it has chapter summaries, exercises and advanced exercises at the end of each chapter. I didn’t get the Teacher’s edition, so the answers are not listed to the exercises or in an appendix nor on Mark Sobell’s website. Maybe the 1,056-page size negated that being in print, but if the book were more reader-friendly, I personally would have expected an answers section somewhere. The book says even-number answers are located on his website. As of this writing, they are missing. There are errata links and even-numbered answers for his other books, however, if you go to their book links on his website.

I found one page in this edition that was missing. Actually, it was replaced with one further back in the book, like exactly 10 pages later. So I see where Prentice Hall’s press shop somehow skipped a digit electronically and their QA didn’t catch it.

On the other hand, the Preface does an excellent job listing the features and contents as it’s own “book review”.

What I really enjoyed were the references to the GUI (Graphic User Interface) tools and their CLI (Command Line Interface) counterparts. I also thought the NetInfo section was excellent.

In the System Maintenance section, there is even information about how to avoid Trojan Horses. ((Path variables not having colons at the beginning or end or a double-colon anywhere in the path).

Mark Sobell’s website has a full Table of Contents list, so I won’t repeat it here. However, I will do like I do with other book reviews and do a quick synopsis.

The book is divided into 7 parts with part one intended for newbees covering and introduction to 30 or so command line utilities, the file system and the shell. Part 2 the vim and emacs editors. Part 3 gets into the Bourne Again and TC shells. Part 4 is where I was most interested, because it digs into networking and system maintenance. Part 5 discusses various programming tools with separate chapters on awk and sed. Part 6 is the utility-belt list of 90 or so “most important” utilities. And part seven has 3 appendices on regular expressions a help section and the 2-page features and quirks section and an extensive 500-term glossary.

What I do like is that UNIX is spelled correctly and with the trademark throughout the book. What I don’t like is that Prentice Hall posted a bunch of comment-quotes on their website and those apparently were repeated on Amazon.com regarding the Linux book and not the Mac OS X Tiger book. Where this book is posted.

During this review, the author updated his website so that the questions and errata can be seen, including the missing page.

Other than these “glitches”, I highly recommend this book. It isn’t just “Practical”, it is comprehensive.