Mac hacking

A dual reading selection today, mostly because both are sitting next to me, waiting to ship up New England way to my friend Rich, and both deal with the same topic. Mac OS X Hacks, by Rael Dornfest and Kevin Hemenway, was one of the early–if not the first–books in O’Reilly’s Hacks series. The authors, along with numerous contributors, take the reader through many different aspects of the Mac OS X operating system. The book was published in 2003, and covered OS X up through the Jaguar edition.
The second title, Mac OS X Panther Hacks, is the follow-up to the aforementioned book, and will soon be supplanted, I’m sure, by Mac OS X Tiger Hacks. Credit must be given to Rael and co-author James Duncan Davidson for not regurgitating hacks from the first book, but rather, again with the help of contributors, introducing one hundred new ways to make using OS X easier, more efficient, and more fun. Both tomes are highly recommended for those who want to get under the hood of Apple’s great operating system.