O’Reilly & Associates has released “Mac OS X Hacks” by Rael Dornfest and Kevin Hemenway, a US$24.95, 400-page book designed to teach readers how to take full advantage of the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X.
The book offers solutions to administering and running a UNIX machine: Web, Mail, and FTP serving; security services; SSH; Perl and shell scripting; compiling; configuring; scheduling; and general all-purpose hacking. The book also tells you how to customize and modify your hardware and software to meet specific needs. Each “hack” in the book can be read in a few minutes, and the book offers direct, hands-on solutions for newbies to the Mac platform and long-time users delving into Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings.
Several sample Mac hacks, including “Creating a One-Wire Network” and “Turning a Command-Line Script into an Application,” are available free online. Also online is more information on “Mac OS X Hacks,” including the table of contents, index and author biographies.