Reviewer: Pierre Igot
Date: October 2, 2001
Full Title: Mac OS X Little Black Book – Concise Problem Solver
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.0 or higher; no CD included.
Author: Gene Steinberg
Publisher: Coriolis
Price: US $29.99, CDN $44.99

So, what exactly is a “Black Book”?

According to the Coriolis web site, “consistent throughout the popular Black Books series is its easy to use problem-solutions format, and its industry-leading depth of information and analysis… Black Books contain in depth analysis and immediate solutions to global programming, administration, and networking challenges. For a concise and portable reference tool, Little Black Books provide brief overviews and cross-referenced immediate solutions.”

In other words, a Black Book focuses on providing the reader with easy access to solutions, while maintaining a depth of analysis that will satisfy more advanced users as well. And a “Little” Black Book is a more concise and portable version of the “Black Book” format. (Coriolis also publishes the Mac OS X Black Book by Mark R. Bell and Debrah D. Suggs.)

More specifically, the back cover of the Mac OS X Little Black Book, by experienced Mac writer Gene Steinberg, indicates that it is intended for “any Mac user preparing to upgrade to Mac OS X,” but also for “system administrators needing to deploy the new OS on their networks.”

Does Gene Steinberg’s Little Black Book on Mac OS X achieve all those ambitious goals? Let’s take a closer look at the book.

Nice Format

The first thing you notice about the Mac OS X Little Black Book is its physical appearance. Its cover and back cover are predominantly black colored, it is fairly small (6×9 in) and quite lightweight for a 450-page volume. While not exactly “pocket” sized, it is definitely easy to carry around.

The body text is printed in an easy Clearface typeface, with side bars in a light, narrow, oblique sans-serif font. (My often-tired eyes did occasionally find this side bar font a bit harder to read, but this obviously is a subjective matter.)

Each and every page of the book, in addition to the standard header and footer, also contains a black “tab” on its outside edge that indicates which chapter it is part of. This helps when trying to locate a topic by flipping through the book’s pages.

Mac OS X Little Black Book: Typical page

Each chapter is structured in two parts: first of all, a 3- or 4-page “In Brief” section on the topic that the chapter deals with, and then a series of “Immediate Solutions,” which effectively tell you how to do stuff.

As well, the book contains tons of screen captures. While those captures are all black-and-white, they provide lots of visual material to support and enhance the text.

Other reference tools include a “Contents at a glance” page at the very beginning of the book, followed by a general table of contents. The back of the book features a 23-page glossary of computer phrases — which contains both Mac-specific terms and more general computer- and Internet-related concepts — and a comprehensive 13-page index. In addition, the first page of each of the 22 chapters includes a table with quick page number references to the “immediate solutions” provided within that chapter. The body of the text itself also contains many useful cross-references that make it easier to use the book as a reference tool rather than as a “manual.”

Finally, the book also includes a detachable, three-page fold-out printed on thicker and stiffer paper, which contains a quick reference to basic setup aspects and OS X system preferences settings.

Taking the Plunge

Given the ambitions of the “Black Book” format, the challenge is to provide readers with immediate solutions that require little explanation, but also with more in-depth analysis for more inquisitive Mac OS X users. With his extensive experience as a Mac user, writer, advocate, and technical support person, Gene Steinberg brings a no-nonsense approach that leaves criticism aside and instead focuses on achieving a high level of familiarity with the new OS as quickly as possible.

In other words, the Mac OS X Little Black Book is not intended to provide you with Gene’s personal opinion on whether Mac OS X is a good OS, a better OS than the classic Mac OS, or a better OS than Windows (Gene has written over 20 books on computers and the Internet, including the Windows 2000 Mac Support Little Black Book). For more opinionated pieces, you can check out Gene’s own Web site at www.macnightowl.com, for example.

The Mac OS X Little Black Book effectively guides you through your discovery and exploration of Mac OS X. Knowledge of the classic Mac OS is obviously an advantage, but is not an absolute prerequisite. Gene goes into enough detail so that you can actually use his book to effectively set yourself up from scratch in OS X. While he does make comparisons between the new OS and the classic Mac OS and does devote a fairly short (15-page) chapter to “Using Older Programs with Mac OS X,” Gene clearly takes the plunge into Mac OS X and wants to take you along for the ride.

In short, if you are a long-time Mac user, but Mac OS X scares you somewhat because of what you’ve heard or read about how different it is from the traditional Mac experience, the Mac OS X Little Black Book is definitely the book for you. On many occasions, Gene Steinberg makes a deliberate effort to show that, while the “Aqua” interface is indeed quite a drastic departure from the traditional Mac interface and requires some getting used to, things are not all that different in Mac OS X and that Apple has successfully managed to preserve a good part of the traditional Mac experience.

In light of all the criticism and controversy that has surrounded the release of the new OS, this is a very welcome approach that brings the debate back to real-life proportions and focuses on what all this really means for the average Mac user.

Lots of Details

This focus on taking the average Mac user by the hand in setting up and exploring Mac OS X does not mean that the “advanced” user is left out — quite the contrary. Because Gene is an experienced user himself and knows that every detail in the user experience counts, he manages to include enough bits of information that even advanced users are likely to discover something that they hadn’t noticed during their own exploration of Mac OS X.

Here’s a very simple example: While I did know that you could choose to ask Mac OS X to automatically hide the Dock and show it only when you drag the mouse to the bottom of the screen, I hadn’t noticed that this feature, which can be enabled/disabled in the “Dock” pane of the System Preferences control panel, can also be enabled/disabled in the “Dock” sub-menu in the new system-wide Apple menu. Or, more accurately, if I had noticed that you could also change the setting through that menu item, I hadn’t noticed that Apple also provides you with a keyboard shortcut to toggle the feature on and off.

Sure enough, on page 97, Gene not only explains how the feature works, but also adds this tip:

TIP: You can also make the Dock hide itself when the mouse isn’t near by pressing Command-Option-D.

I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t noticed this keyboard shortcut in the Dock sub-menu myself — and, while going to a sub-menu was too much of a hassle, I find myself using the keyboard shortcut all the time now.

Similarly, as an experienced Mac user, Gene Steinberg has bits of advice that can be useful to many people and not just novice users. On page 48, for example, when talking about adjusting gamma settings for your monitor and, in particular, the part of the Display Calibrator Assistant where you need to determine the “Native Gamma” of your monitor by moving slides for each basic color (Red, Green and Blue) so that the solid Apple logo in the middle blends in with the striped background as much as possible, he advises:

TIP: It’s a good idea not to sit too close to your display when making these adjustments. You get the most accurate view of gamma settings if you sit back from the display as far as possible. Otherwise, you might find that the inner and outer portions of the square never seem to come together.

His page of tips on customizing your information request in Sherlock (p. 132) is also excellent. It’s small details like these that, to me, reflect the thoroughness of Gene Steinberg’s review of Mac OS X and the depth of his own experience with Macintosh computer systems.

For such a comprehensive work, it is also remarkable how few typos or small errors the book contains. One of the most glaring is in the detachable fold-out, which states that, in order to restart your Mac so that it boots from the CD, you need to press… the Shift key. This is, of course, incorrect (it’s the “C” key), and the same error is unfortunately repeated on page 28. But this is really the only significant error that I could find. (Another, more minor one is that the “Internet Connect” application, which many people are likely to use, is called “PPP Connect” in the glossary, which was its name in the Mac OS X Public Beta, but was changed in the final version.)

It should be noted, however, that Coriolis provides an “Errata” page with corrections for most of those errors.

Not a Bug Report

One thing that should be mentioned is that Gene Steinberg chooses not to dwell on Mac OS X’s current bugs and shortcomings (such as the iffy AppleTalk support, the preferences that don’t “stick,” etc.). Given that OS X is still very much a work in progress, this is probably a wise approach. This ensures better durability for the book, as those bugs will likely be fixed soon and devoting pages of printed text to them would be counterproductive both from the writer’s and from the reader’s point of view. This said, it also means that those that are faced with such bugs and problems will not find “immediate solutions” to them in this book. This book’s “solutions” have to do with “problems” relating to people’s understanding of how the software works and, as such, is more of a “learning” tool than a “trouble-shooting” tool (if “trouble-shooting” is understood as “working around bugs”).

This is the only aspect of the book that leads me to question the fact that the back cover also recommends the book for “system administrators needing to deploy the new OS on their networks.” Even in my little experience deploying OS X on local area networks, I have uncovered several problems not addressed at all by this book, such as the “BadPassword” bug in Mac OS X’s AppleTalk support.

This said, I haven’t had time to install and explore Mac OS X 10.1 yet — and this update likely fixes many of the bugs that I am referring to. But this also raises the question of whether this book is still a good buy now that a new version of the system is already out, which the book obviously doesn’t cover in its current incarnation.

The short answer is still “yes,” precisely because Gene Steinberg chose not to dwell on Mac OS X 10.0’s bugs and flaws. Based on what I have heard and read, the 10.1 update is very much an incremental upgrade, as the numbering indicates. It doesn’t introduce drastic changes to the Aqua interface, the applications included, or the system underpinnings. I do not expect, therefore, the Mac OS X Little Black Book to become particularly outdated with the release of this new version. The majority of its contents are still valid, and it still remains a valuable tool. When it is updated to reflect the changes in 10.1, it will simply become even more valuable. (According to Gene, “There will be a 10.1 version of the book later this year, which will also include some additional terminal material, in response to the requests of some readers who wanted to learn how to explore the underbelly of the new operating system.”)

Unix for the Masses

Finally, I would like to say a word about how little “Unix stuff” there is in this book. This, to me, is not only a reflection of how successful Apple has been at relegating the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X to the background and not letting them interfere with the work of the average Mac user, but also of how Gene Steinberg is in sync with Apple’s approach in that respect.

With the migration to Mac OS X, the temptation to bring more “geekness” into the world of the average Mac user is very much there, and Gene Steinberg is careful not to fall into the trap. He does mention a few things that have to do with Terminal and the command-line interface, but never goes beyond those. In that respect, the Mac OS X Little Black Book is very much a Macintosh book, i.e. a book about computing for “the rest of us” — and, in my opinion, this is an approach that is still as valid today as it was 25 years ago.

Conclusion

There are many more aspects of this book that I haven’t had a chance to touch upon, including Gene Steinberg’s quick reviews of a variety of both Apple and non-Apple Mac OS X applications and utilities, tips about connecting additional hardware accessories to your Mac OS X-running computer, tips about mobile computing under OS X, etc. They only contribute further to making this book a very good, well-rounded reference tool for current and prospective Mac OS X users.

With his resolutely solutions-oriented approach, Gene Steinberg continues the excellent tradition of the Macintosh, i.e. of computing that focuses on getting things done rather than learning heaps of pointless, esoteric jargon and non-intuitive techniques.