John Ray (3) (1971–)

This little gem of a book applies to Macbooks, Macbooks Pros, and Macbook Air computers. I have had my Macbook Pro for 3 years and and I can honestly say that learning my way around this amazing computer would have been faster and easier if I had this book as a resource at the beginning.

This book covers it all from opening to closing and in a clear, concise, very well illustrated way.I recently upgraded my software from Tiger to Snow Leopard and this book even helped with this. Although show more there is enough technical date in the book to satisfy a techy type I think that the book is also well done enough that it is easy for a rank beginner to be able to use and learn from. It's an excellent reference book that now lives close to my Macbook Pro. I can highly recommend this book show less

I pride myself on being able to figure things out, but sometimes I need a leeetle bit of help. This happened once again when my company made the transition to Macintosh OS X. I had heard that there were a number of changes to the system and that it wasn't quite as idiot proof as the previous Mac systems. (My first attempt to play with OS X resulted in a frantic hour late one Saturday night. 'Twas a problem that was due, I believe, to moving a few files out of the appropriate folder.) So I show more made a rare financial investment in my (snicker!) career and bought this book back in 2003. It does a nice enough job explaining the new system and pointing out major differences between it and its predecessors. It also gives a good explanation of OS X's origins and the rationale behind some of the changes. (So I learned to stop cussing everytime I have to log in just to use the estupido computer) From there, however, it goes on to detail the possibilities offered by the UNIX system 'pon which OS X rests. It was a bit interesting. However, I haven't used much of it. I guess I'm not the tech head I used to be. Anyway, even though I sometimes wish I had bought Robin William's OS X book instead, I would definitely recommend that anyone running a modern Macintosh to check this book out.
--J. show less

This book is excellent for the Xcode beginner. I haven't so much as coded anything in about 10 years and wanted to write an app, and I'm certainly not a pro but at least now I know the basics and can figure out the rest with more advanced tutorials online. This book covers all of the basics of writing apps in iOS and walks you through them step-by-step. It also has introductory chapters on how to get set up as a developer, which is also important. The book also lets you know what other show more resources are available for bringing your apps to a higher level of complexity. show less

This might be a good book for a power user, but for someone like me who just uses a Mac as a day-to-day machine and a slick front-end for a UNIX box, it's pretty useless: the user-friendliness of the OS X interface obviates owning a how-to book. There are some parts of the internals that remain obscure to me—for instance, the exact structure of the Applications folder, or certain XML system configuration files—and I keep this book around on the odd chance that I'll want to tweak them show more someday, but realistically I doubt I'll ever open it. show less