No book can be everything to everyone, but Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell does have an audience: one that first needs some clarification.
A question that came up a while back is “Why do I need a Nutshell book if I already have the Missing Manual?” We explain some of the reasoning and the audiences for both books here.
The Missing Manuals (copublished by Pogue Press and O’Reilly) are a series of books aimed at the beginner- to intermediate-level user. The books are written in friendly prose and cover everything users want to know and more.
O’Reilly’s Nutshell series is the opposite of that. These books take a more terse approach to the topic. They give you what you need to know in as few words as possible, while at the same time covering things that are useful not only to beginners, but also advanced users.
The resulting package—the combination of the Missing Manual and the Nutshell book—provides you with the depth and coverage not attainable in a single book (unless, of course, you don’t mind lifting weights).
So, to get back to the original question, the answer is: to truly master Mac OS X, you probably do need both the Missing Manual and the Nutshell book. Each book takes a different approach to covering Mac OS X, and each offers something the other can’t.
Due to the unusual pedigree of Mac OS X, readers might meet it in a
number of ways. This book is aimed at folks with a more technical
bent than the average user—the power user.
This book will come in handy as a quick reference guide for those who
are curious about what happens under Mac OS X’s hood
(and how you might tinker with it) and will be useful to those who
are using Mac OS X as a server or development platform.
It’s important to note that this book doesn’t cover Mac OS X Server; it covers only the client version, Mac OS X Panther. For more information on Mac OS X Server, see Apple’s online documentation at http://www.apple.com/macosxserver.
This book focuses mainly on topics that aren’t likely to interest those who use Mac OS X primarily to run applications, such as word processing, graphic design, browsing the Web, and so on. These users might be better served by more user-friendly volumes, such as Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition (Pogue Press/O’Reilly) or the Mac OS X Panther Pocket Guide (O’Reilly), both of which were recently revised for Panther.
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