Chapter 5. Getting Help Inside Mac OS X

As you explore Mac OS X, you will increasingly come across new and exciting areas of the operating system. Mac OS X is a huge, and complex, operating system and sooner or later everybody needs help. When you come across unfamiliar territory, Mac OS X offers a number of methods of built-in assistance.

The main method of reading help files is through a built-in application called the Help Viewer. The Help Viewer provides explanations for most basic tasks, as well as documentation relating to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. You can use it to learn basic features about Mac OS X and discover how to use basic hardware, and it acts as a showcase for new features found in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Another type of assistance offered by Mac OS X is help tags. These are yellow labels that appear when the mouse is positioned over various GUI (graphical user interface) elements and offer further explanation as to what function the element provides.

A further help service is available via man pages in Terminal. These pages outline command-line tasks used in the Terminal application.

In addition to the Mac OS X help, many applications provide their own comprehensive help sections. Furthermore, you can use the Internet as a resource. Apple provides comprehensive help through its ...

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