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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Good hand holder
Like an astronaut or a high wire circus artist, I leaped from my semi-secure base of PC where I lived for 26 years into Mac World. I always wanted to be snob . This book was as good as I can imagine lacking an inhouse patient, in-house tech person. The most horrible part of the move was and is the mail program which is hysterical, erratic and malicious...but that's not this good book's fault.
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Update of my Tiger Edition review
After using the Tiger version of Mac OS X (10.4) for a couple of months, I updated to the Leopard version (10.5) and obtained the Leopard edition of David Pogue's book from O'Reilly. Because of the new features in Leopard, this edition has expanded from 515 pages to 590 pages.
Although I expected to find a short section listing all of the new features introduced by Leopard, its absence is not a serious problem. These lists can be found on the Internet and then printed for reference.
This edition of the book follows the same chapter layout as the Tiger edition and includes all the very helpful features for anyone switching from a Windows-based PC to an iMac or MacBook. In addition to continually taking the PC-user's viewpoint in every section, there are chapters and sections especially designed to ease the transition. The most helpful for PC users are:
Chapter 1 - How the Mac is different
Chapters 5-7 - Transferring files, emails, contacts, etc. from your PC and also, Mac capabilities for replacing specific Windows programs
Appendix B - Where Did It Go? You'll find yourself referring to this useful appendix often to quickly find out how to do all the things that were second-nature on the PC, e.g., Ctl-Alt-Delete to `kill' stuck programs, shutdown, zipping/unzipping files, taskbar & system tray, favorites, and much more.
It you are switching from a PC to a Mac running Leopard, you'll love this book. But if you already have the Tiger edition and just want the Leopard content, then you will benefit more from purchasing the more comprehensive (almost 900 pages) Mac Leopard OS X: The Missing Manual, 2007, which is also by David Pogue.
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Great reference for those comfortable with Windows.
I've been using Windows, DOS, and "PCs" for years. I had a brief exposure to Macs for about 4 years in the mid-1990's while in college, but that was with System 7, a horrendous OS so bad that I have avoided Macs since then. So with all the fuss over Vista and the aging XP, I decided to give Macs another chance. I needed a reference book to help with the switch over and this one turned out to be perfect for someone like myself experienced with Windows and technology but needing to know the basics of a new OS.
This book is not for people who are new to computers in general. Not really. It's intended for those of us with a working knowledge or better of Windows and takes a lot of material from Pogue's other more in depth books and packs it into a smaller, more easily digestible package. It's great as a reference as well as being easy to read straight through.
It focuses on the Mac equivalents to common Windows tasks, the different terminology for OS X, etc. It also covers a lot of information that I find even long-term Mac users don't typically know about. It's a perfect book to get for someone who is switching from Windows to OS X.
I still use this as a reference even after being on OS X almost a year now. I find it to be an excellent resource for others who have made the Mac plunge recently as well, as they have universally found it to be accessible, fast, and very helpful.
Rating: 
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A book for those who already know its contents
I am switching from PC to iMAC after tiring of continual crashes and bought this to aid me. This book is of only slight value to a novice. If the reader knew as much about iMACs as the author assumes, there would be little reason to purchase this book. Check it out yourself. Think of some simple operations that you perform on your PC. Then, peruse the index for this book in an attempt to learn how to perform the same functions on an iMAC. In the unlikely event that you find in the index what you are looking for, read the indicated pages. If you can get past the computer gibberish, you may finds something meaningful. I couldn't. And when I tried to carefully follow the instructions, the things that the books affirms will occur, did not occur. Fortunately, there seem to be several ways to perform any function on the iMAC. So by mindlessly clicking on things and wasting a lot of time I could learn myself what this book falsely promised to teach me.
Its best use is to just read it through and get some feel for what Leopard is. That's not why I bought it.
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Switching to the MAC
This is/was a great help to me a Windows/Linux user. The MAC is awesome and the OSX a welcome change to what I'm use to. OSX is different and similar and this text sorts out the quirks. I found it a quick read and full of help. The items this doesn't cover Google does. It made a good transition for me.
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