Macintosh Systems Books

This is an astonishingly lame, poorly written and shoddily researched book. I've read a number of books about the iLife software, and this book is a rehash of Apple's Help files and product announcements, with the quotation marks filed off. Do yourself a favor and look at Pogue's individual books for each app, or Teach Yourself Visually iLife '04 for a basic intro. Avoid this one--it reeks.

Inside Macintosh: Powerpc System Software (Apple Technical Library)

Not enough in depth information. I ordered this book as soon as I purchased Keynote, but by the time it came (one week later) I already knew everything the book covered! The section on charts is a joke! It tells you nothing! Very disappointing.

I wrote this book. It was a good book in 1984, but it is completely out of date. If you want to learn about Mac software, buy something else.

It's old and outdated. It doesn't produce publication quality graphics. It's not accelerated for PowerMac. It's hard to use.

If you already own Mathematica, just get DynPac from Mathsource. DynPac has a steeper learning curve, but produces more useful graphs and data.

This is a terrible book, because it's not a book; it's a college workbook written by some idiot professor who gives you a quiz on what you should have learned having read the chapter. It doesn't tell you squat about Word 98 for the Mac. For instance, I have problems with my template; for some absolutely unknown reason, my template changed. I want to change it back to something useful. Such advice is not to be found anywhere in this "book." How about changing the attributes of the menus? Not to be found in this "book." How about getting rid of that idiot Microsoft "window man," who suddenly appears when he thinks you're writing a letter? Nope. How about finding your old spell-check dictionary after having upgraded your OS? No such luck with any of those questions in this "book." The only thing this "book" helps you with is how to click the mouse. Whatever you do, don't waste your money like I did buying this "book." You're better off buying a Pet Rock.

Your money is better spent, in my humble opinion, buying one of the other books of this subject. The author writes with a style spewing arrogance with little demonstrated knowledge of his subject matter.

I quickly returned this book to the store where I bought it and got my money back. I only pity the poor fool who buys the book from them used, and can't then take it back because he bought it used.

This book was bad in 1991 but for todays OS8 based resources it is little more than a paperweight, it's useless. Come on Apple Write an Update and include something useful this time. I.E. a complete list of all the resources, how to edit them, what they mean, what you can and can't do, and how to edit hex-code. Thanks

I found so many errors in the first 40 pages that I stopped reading and returned the book to the store.

1) Figure 2.1 The iMac desktop, shows the arrows in the scroll bar in the wrong position. On an iMac, both up and down arrows are located in the lower right corner of the scroll bar. And the author didn't know this?

2) Page 28 (with illustration of a lightbulb and called "Tip"- Tip is defined in the beginning of the book as a way to find out shortcuts and other timesaving advice (for the iMac)," but the writer uses this so-called tip to tell you she (the author) might use a word other than "icon" to describe an icon. What has this to do with an iMac?*** 3) On page 34, the author says: "In an emergency....press the keyboard combination command+control+power. Your iMac will restart, destroying any information that you have not saved and possibly messing up your hard drive." What kind of writer would tell you to do this if it might mess up your hard drive?*** 4) The second paragraph on page 38 ends with the same sentence printed twice. Such sloppy work indicates this was written in haste and without an eye for details like these, so I'm returning the book to the store. I doubt there will be a second edition. Buy iMac for Dummies instead.

I don't know if the program is the problem, but this book was not easy to use or helpful. It seems to just repeat the help screens, which are also worthless.