Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

For a company that promised to “put a pause on new features,” Apple sure has been busy-there’s barely a feature left untouched in Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” There’s more speed, more polish, more refinement-but still no manual. Fortunately, David Pogue is back, with the humor and expertise that have made this the #1 bestselling Mac book for eight years straight. You get all the answers with jargon-free introductions to:

* Big-ticket changes. A 64-bit overhaul. Faster everything. A rewritten Finder. Microsoft Exchange compatibility. All-new QuickTime Player. If Apple wrote it, this book covers it.
* Snow Leopard Spots. This book demystifies the hundreds of smaller enhancements, too, in all 50 programs that come with the Mac: Safari, Mail, iChat, Preview, Time Machine.
* Shortcuts. This must be the tippiest, trickiest Mac book ever written. Undocumented surprises await on every page.
* Power usage. Security, networking, build-your-own Services, file sharing with Windows, even Mac OS X’s Unix chassis-this one witty, expert guide makes it all crystal clear.

About the Author
David Pogue is the personal-technology columnist for “The New York Times”. Each week, he contributes a print column, an online column, an online video, and a popular daily blog, “Pogue’s Posts.” He is also an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News, and he appears each week on CNBC with his trademark comic tech videos. With more than 3 million books in print, he is one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “Dummies” series, and in 1999 he launched his own series of computer books called the Missing Manual series, which now includes more than 100 titles. He has been profiled on “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes.” Pogue’s website is www.davidpogue.com and his Twitter screen name is Pogue. He lives in Connecticut.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
A fantastic Snow Leopard Resource
I love the Missing Manual series by David Pogue and have been waiting for the release of this version.

As with all of the Missing Manuals, this book is very well arranged and readable. You needn’t be a complete techie to enjoy Pogue’s writing style and the index and appendices are very helpful in locating exactly what you need.

Snow Leopard brings about little tweaks in Apple’s newest OS and this Missing Manual explores them. The changes are not large changes, but they are there. I sold my Leopard copy and upgraded my Mac and book to Snow Leopard. Do you need this copy of the missing manual if you already own David Pogue’s Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual? Probably not unless you really like to get underneath the hood. If you are starting afresh with the new OS version, this new copy is the way to go. If you own the Leopard version of Pogue’s book already and you only use it for an occasional reference here and there, you will probably do just fine. All in all, dollars very well spent.

Got-it-all followup to the Leopard book; fresh material added as needed
As a VISTA-phobe Mac switcher, no one did a better job than Pogue at making me feel at home with Leopard. He’s done it again for Snow Leopard — where eye candy was sparse, but getting the OS ready for the future was the driving force, as well as much needed updates of the standard apps to enhance performance. Outwardly, Snow Leopard is no avalanche, hence much of the book is an updated quality rewrite of the Leopard book; but where it counts — as in describing the newly streamlined Automator — the author maintains his outstanding track record of clarity and humor.

Thinking it was little more than a cleverly promoted Leopard version update, I installed Snopard upon release … what a mistake! Frequent failures in opening or closing files, inability to send mail and constant crash reports made me hold on to a reserve Leopard drive – if only to get the email out. Many (but hardly all) of these glitches were corrected by the 10.6.1 release; although importing and saving files with Adobe products remain daily crash report events [feels like a beta tester!]. No way was I going to let Snopard take over until I had it checked out by Pogue. As a measure of my confidence, Pogue gave me the lowdown (and the courage) to do a surprisingly simple ‘Clean Install’ of Snow Leopard after a 2-month wait, letting go of Leopard’s security blanket, and allowing the (yet imperfect) beast to take over as the OS for my computer.

The dauntingly-sized book may seem overwhelming at first, but the author has that rare gift of simplifying daily operations, yet provide all the detail that more advanced users demand. The chapter on Automation alone is worth the price of admission; with the drastic makeover of “ImageCapture”, now serving as a frontend image collector within Automator, I would have been lost. Also, I feel reassured that some of the ‘bugs’ aren’t Apple’s so much as third party providers’, and that Apple will address remaining incompatibilities with the Finder; moreover, as recommended, even with 8MB of RAM, the 32-bit kernel mode seems more stable than the 64-bit mode – at least for using non-Apple software.

Overall, this book comes as close to being the definitve guide to Snow Leopard as can be — both for newcomers and for oldtimers. Highly recommended!

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