Five New Mac Books for the Holidays

Twas a month before Macworld,
and all through my head.
Came visions of Panther,
and books, put to bed.

Yes, folks, it's been a busy Fall writing/editing season here in MacLand at O'Reilly. Like other publishers, as soon as we knew Panther was on the way, we went into high gear and started plotting the course to update our Mac books and get new ones into the mix.

The first to release on Panther was my own, the Mac OS X Panther Pocket Guide, released only a couple weeks ago. But we didn't stop with just a simple little book. No, there's far more in the works, and before year's end, there will be five new Mac books from O'Reilly waiting for you:

• Published as part of the Apple Developer Connection series, Matt Neuburg's AppleScript: The Definitive Guide has been in the works, and was tweaked at the last minute to include Panther coverage. This is the first major AppleScript book to be released in years, and in many ways, it demystifies AppleScript like never before. If you've been wanting to learn AppleScript, this is the book you've been waiting for.


• Mac OS X Unwired, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, focuses solely on the wireless side of Mac OS X, covering AirPort wireless networks and Bluetooth.


• Another update to release is Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, by Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson. This book is intended for Unix newbies, and is particularly useful for Mac OS 9 converts who are just getting started with Mac OS X and want to learn more about what happens under its Aqua interface.

And finally, two books I can't wait to see in print:

• Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition, by none other than David Pogue
• Running Mac OS X Panther, by James Duncan Davidson

What would a new release of Mac OS X be like without a new edition of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual? Well, it would be like daytime, but without the Sun. There's a reason why this book has been the best-selling computer book for the past two years: David explains Mac OS X like nobody else can. You'll learn more than just the basics with the Missing Manual, and by its end, you'll be hungry for the next book...

Running Mac OS X Panther takes over where the Missing Manual leaves off. Duncan takes you deep into Mac OS X's Unix core and shows you how to do things few books barely even scratch the surface of. Here you'll find extensive coverage on Open Directory, networking and network services, printing with CUPS, working with disks and disk images, and more. The book covers both the GUI and command-line tools, but spends most of its time swimming around the Unix layer.

The first three books are already available, and the last two should be going to the printer shortly, making all of them available by the end of the year, with plenty of time for Macworld San Francisco.

And this is just a taste of what's to come; there are more updates and new titles releasing in the New Year.

Chuck Toporek is a Mac technology geek and a senior acquisitions editor with Addison-Wesley, a division of Pearson Education. He is the author of three Mac books and one medical book, and he has written for MacAddict and Macworld magazines.

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