Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag of tips and tricks
Review: 'Mac OS X Hacks' is a good grab bag of tips and techniques for getting the most from your Mac. While the tips are not as universally appealing (even among Mac owners) as those in 'Google Hacks' most people will find some value in the selection; some may find it a little thin.The book is split into 9 chapters; 'Files', 'Startup", 'Multimedia and the iApps', 'The User Interface', 'Unix and the Terminal', 'Networking', 'Email', 'The Web' and 'Databases'. For my money the last chapter is a complete waste of space since it only covers installing MySQL and PostgresSQL, and if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you shouldn't use them. A number of the other tips would come close to that level, I feel their only use may be to encourage people who would otherwise stay away to make some use of the terminal and similar tools. When I first started reviewing the book I would have complained about a large number of the tips being too application specific, too general or too low in skill level. Since then I've had a friend who wanted to edit a movie and we both found the chapter on iApps useful, one with a brand new Bluetooth phone who liked the couple of tips on Bluetooth and another who found the cross platform Windows-Mac stuff useful. So I have to say that while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later. Overall the book is well written, well laid out and well cross-referenced and covers a wide range of information. My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material. Since you shouldn't really get this book until you are at least Mac proficient and probably own a basic Mac book or two then perhaps a tenth of the hundred tips will be covered in most Mac books and perhaps another five to ten you will have discovered on your own. Reading over my notes I feel split between raving about how good the book is - well written with a bunch of useful tips and tricks for any Mac user - and complaining about the useless nature of some of the tips. So I am left saying that if the book falls into your definition of 'inexpensive' then grab a copy. If the price is 'expensive' then just make sure a friend owns a copy and borrow theirs every so often.
Rating: 
Summary: Hack-A-Mac
Review: ...O'Reilly has never steered me wrong with books for UNIX, Windows, Perl, you name it. So therefore when I saw the "MAC OS X HACKS" book I immediately grabbed a copy. Having just finished "Google Hacks", another O'Reilly publication, I was eager to dive in and see if this book would be as useful as the Google book. I would not be disappointed. One of the unique aspects of this book is you can turn to any "hack" and begin applying it without having to read the others. The book is like a collection of many magazine articles brought together under one roof - and with all the media fluff removed. I was amazed at how a novice like me could easily follow the step-by-step instructions and not feel lost. I soon found myself using color-coded paperclips to mark off sections of the book for future reference in terms of what they did (OS setting, audio settings, etc.). You can dive right into some of the more advanced hacks, such as setting up your own mail server, without having to worry that the authors will assume you are familiar with how to do a particular step. They walk you through the entire process; complete with screen shots for some of the more tricky options, and let you focus on the task at hand. Considering how much benefit this novice MAC OS X user got from the book, more advanced Macintosh users are likely to find that this book provides a quick "easy reference" for some of the more tricky or complicated setups. Since the book is organized into independent sections, one could easily use this for a desktop reference. Plus, it's not the "Macintosh for Dummies" type of book that seems to fill most shelves nowadays - the authors assume you want to do the advanced stuff with OS X, but just need some tips to get you going. Hopefully O'Reilly will continue with the "Hacks" series of books (I'm eagerly awaiting a book on Windows Hacks!); they are the first series of books that really let the end users get under the hood of various platforms and tasks and "get the job done" without feeling lost. I would not be surprised to see MAC OS X Hacks, as well as other Hacks books, come out in volume format. After all, after spending almost a week with the MAC OS X book, I can see how these can quickly expand to cover a lot more topics in a similar, condensed format - which for us "get it done now" type people is a godsend!
Rating:
Summary: I was so wrong
Review: Here we have a rather well done little book that I wasn't going to bother to review because I assumed that it was just a boring collection of the same old tired hacks one can find on dozens of web pages. The very idea of even opening such a book made me tired, bored, uninterested. I just didn't think I could even bear to read it, never mind review it. Once again, I was wrong. The first thing I liked about this is something we are starting to see more frequently: some use of color in the text. Photos and screen shots are still black and white (still too expensive to do that much yet), but section headings are nicely set off in purple. Such a small thing, and probably something that will become very common soon, but it enhanced my reading experience. If this really was the boring collection of so called hints I thought it was, the purple text effect wouldn't have been enough to keep me going. But I did keep going. Yes, a lot of it was stuff I already knew, and some of it (the movie editing, for example) is stuff I have no real interest in. But all of it is practical: there's none of the silly "turn your scroll bars into cartoon characters" kind of nonsense. The authors obviously use their Macs to do real work, and the tips and hacks reflect that. Would you expect to find instructions and examples of using MySQL and PostgeSQL? This has those. It also has instructions for using a Bluetooth enabled phone as a modem, and enough other esoteric hacks that you'll surely find more than enough value for your money. Interestingly, I couldn't find a single thing I disagreed with either. Every time I thought that a little carelessness had crept in, the next paragraph gave the very caveat that had bothered me. Nicely done. That's almost always true of O'Reilly books, but it still needs to be said.
Rating:
Summary: Great book albeit already dated
Review: I am coming back to Mac after 8 years of unix and linux, so it's cool to have a book like this. It has a lot of good tips about using the Macintosh applications (iPhoto, iMovie, Mail) as well as ways to integrate them with the unix stuff (cron, apache, mysql,...). I also loved the information about dynamic domain name service for your broadband connection. I devoured the book in a weekend. One caveat: the book covers OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and we're up to 10.3 (Panther). Some of the iApps have changed since the writing. Interestingly enough, some "hacks" are now easy-to-use features. There are a few notes about this fact, but it would be nice to have a new edition for a new OS. All in all, though, it's a book that makes me feel smart for buying a Mac, and helps me to realize its full potential.
Rating:
Summary: Great book albeit already dated
Review: I am coming back to Mac after 8 years of unix and linux, so it's cool to have a book like this. It has a lot of good tips about using the Macintosh applications (iPhoto, iMovie, Mail) as well as ways to integrate them with the unix stuff (cron, apache, mysql,...). I also loved the information about dynamic domain name service for your broadband connection. I devoured the book in a weekend. One caveat: the book covers OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and we're up to 10.3 (Panther). Some of the iApps have changed since the writing. Interestingly enough, some "hacks" are now easy-to-use features. There are a few notes about this fact, but it would be nice to have a new edition for a new OS. All in all, though, it's a book that makes me feel smart for buying a Mac, and helps me to realize its full potential.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I guess I made the mistake of not reading the table of contents before buying. I just got my copy and started looking for performance tips and hacks. Can't find any. In fact, there aren't many "hacks" at all. Mostly tips and instructions on how to do stuff. For example, running 'dmesg' from the terminal doesn't seem to me to be a hack.
Mac OS X has a bsd subsystem and a unix-like kernel. Certainly, there are things one can do to optimize these, but this book doensn't even attemp to assist. Joe
Rating:
Summary: Great book for becoming a power user
Review: I just finished going through O'Reilly's Mac OS X Hacks. This is a great book. It shows you in detail how to become a power user on the Mac. More important, it has clear, detailed instructions (with lots of screen shots) of how to set up software including networking, DNS, IMAP and POP servers, Bluetooth through iSync, and a whole lot more. There's even a section on how to setup Linux on the Mac hardware. I stayed up last night reading it. Originally, I just wanted to figure out more about Mac Mail but I ended up reading through the whole book thinking, "Wow, I have to try that".
Rating: 
Summary: Not really about hacks
Review: I was quite dispointed with this book. Half the hacks are just advices on installing some extra sharewares found on Version Tracker.
Most of the real hacks describer in the book are also very basic and well known.
The book is well written and the presentation is fluid and confortable.
Rating:
Summary: not for the experienced Unix user/admin
Review: I would not have used the word 'Hacks' in this title as the content is really more like tips for the unix novice. If you know what 'ls -al | wc -l' does and don't think that installing mysql is a hack then don't bother buying this book. I was expecting far more advanced hacking and found the purchase very disappointing, but beginners will probably gush over it.
Rating:
Summary: Unix and Mac Hacker's Paradise
Review: I'm a Unix guy from way back, having worked on TENEX and TOPS-10 systems in the late 70s, on SunOS and Solaris during the 80s and 90s, and having been introduced to Linux in the early 90s. I've worked on Windows PCs mainly for office work (but never on Macs), and when Mac OS X came out, I was in computer geek heaven. I bought a PowerBook G4 with Microsoft Office X, and then I had a laptop with Office, Unix, the command line, and the beautiful Mac look-and-feel and the stunning display. I thought I probably knew quite a bit about Unix and the Mac already, given my background, and I didn't really anticipate how much a book on OS X hacks would have to offer. "Mac OS X Hacks" proved to be a great buy for me! The book has 100 hacks spread across 9 chapters, one for each major area of interest to the authors (Files, Startup, Multimedia, etc.), and almost every chapter contained a hack that was valuable to me. I skimmed the entire book and marked out many hacks for later study, some of which I intend to implement and/or play with immediately. The hacks in which I have initial interest include #8) ejecting jammed CDs, #13) getting a glimpse of the boot process, #21) built-in image conversion, #22) multiple library management for iPhoto, #23) making your own documentary, #24) how the iApps work together, #41) capturing screenshots, #45) speakable Web Services, #58) installing Unix applications with Fink, #59) mirroring files and directories with rsync (for backup), #77) using a cell phone as a Bluetooth modem, #78) using dynamic DNS services to set up an externally-accessible web server at home, #79) working with the Entourage (Outlook for Mac) database, and #88) using the built-in Apache server on the Mac. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in hacking OS X on their Mac. This book should have exciting new information for all but the most experienced hackers of Mac and OS X.
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