Dave Taylor is up front about the Mac flavored UNIX OS and gives us 10 commands to cut our 

teeth on. He refers to his other book on Wicked Cool Shell Scripts he had published by No 

Starch Press over a year ago for folks who want to dig even deeper.  

He even shows how to use vi (text editor) and Pine (Email program).  

Master the command line? Well, maybe not quite, after all there are a few hundred commands 

and this book just hints at the power behind the curtain.  

What I did do however was play with X11, and Fink, load NeoOffice/J a Java based Open 

Source alternative to MS Office) and goof around some with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation 

Program, Open Source app that functions like Photoshop). 

There was just a little bit of frustration as I tried finding the Terminal Inspector (Terminal 

>Window Settings > Terminal Inspector) that somehow got stepped over with otherwise fine 

screenshots and examples. I still need to get more familiar with Fink and GIMP. Fink opens up a 

whole new world by letting Open Source apps into the Mac.  

There are 11 chapters and no Appendices, but there is a short ending chapter that hints at shell 

scripting with Perl, Python and Ruby and compiling with C and C++, Objective C and Cocoa 

and Carbon.  

Dave Taylor does an excellent job walking us through the Unix process and every once in a 

while his humor shows through. He's comfortable in this environment and we should be too. 

This book should be a prerequisite for the one I reviewed last month, Mac OS X Tiger for Unix 

Geeks, but then again, they already know eat, drink and sleep this stuff. No, Learning Unix for 

Mac OS X Tiger is really for the person who is comfortable in the Tiger environment who wants 

to play with the cute Siberian Tiger cub. Learn why so many UNIX and Linux folks are going 

gaga over Mac OS X Tiger. You already have that cute cub in hand and with Mac OS X 10.4.2, 

we may see that Tiger cub having reached adolescence. Learn a little of what they know.  

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 35 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8