MAC OS X Tiger Killer Tips [Paperback]

I switch to Mac in 2003. I am continually amazed of the power of the OS X Tiger operating system. However I, like many of the day to day users of the system, do not know how to access many of the neat tools available to Mac OS X Tiger users. I attend workshops and attend Apple User's Group meetings and I'm blown away by the knowledge and skills of some of our Apple users. The problem for me is that even though the tips or hacks given are great one does not use them enough to remember them several weeks later.

Most publications that cover Apple applications have side bar graphics that draw the readers attention to a neat tip. However, what is really needed is a book that gathers these "Killer Tips" and put them in one resource organized in a manner that allows the reader/user access to the real power of Tiger. That is exactly what Scott Kelby's Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips does.

The book is well designed and the layout is pleasing. The tips contained in the book are the type that cause you to smile, nod and say "amen". Do you want to know how to zip a file in Tiger, capture a page, keep your private data private? The books contains literally hundreds of truly killer tips and they are explained in a language and style that we all can understand. Between the table of contents, index and content specific chapters the navigation of Tiger becomes achievable and the powerful secrets of Tiger are revealed.

This is one book that all Tiger users should have in their library. However, it is especially beneficial to those users that would be considered intermediate users. I highly recommend Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips - its like having a techie on call when you need to access one of those awesome Tiger tools or tricks.

An issue with the family SuperDrive kept me adhered to a stool at a Genius Bar for four hours today. In the meantime, I more or less read the entire Killer Tips text. It was so funny I kept chortling loudly through my nose, much to the chagrin of the Geniuses.

It's useless to have Tiger without high-speed Internet, so until my parents get that (or until I can afford my own PowerMac), Tiger's going to have to just wait. Still, I pored over the available texts on the operating system and found all of them to be atrocious; where I expected full-color, modern renditions I found black & white Xerox-style manuals crammed with so much ridiculous and redundant information, I felt like I was perusing manuals to the Mac SE.

Never one to judge a book too much on its cover, I flipped through pages of each text quickly, and found Killer Tips to be exactly what I wanted to read. Scott Kelby's writing is humble, laugh-out-loud funny, and educational in an easy-to-remember sort of way. Plus, the book is easy to thumb through to find that one tip you need.

The introduction is three pages long. It's required reading. Do not skip over it. You'll see why. The rest of the book is literally comprised of sidebar tips and antics and full color photographs to consolidate your day, truncate the amount of typing (or, in some comical examples where the reader is assumed to be charging by the hour, elongate the amount of typing), assuage those pangs over windows and folders properties, expedite Internet surfing, and so on. The tips range from the general (for the advanced Mac user) to tips that uncover truly secret or deeply buried attributes, features, and options. Kelby goes over the most popular applications including iPhoto, Mail, iMovie, iDVD, and Safari as well as interface properties and widgets.

As Scott Kelby was amassing these tips, he found some that would make great pranks. He therefore created one of the most entertaining chapters in any technical book that lists maniacal means of torturing your co-workers and supervisors (assuming they use OS 10.4). These range from dull (colorless interface and foreign keyboards) to the excruciatingly cool (disappearing hard drives and CDs that open anything but the CD player!). (By the way, there was a silly guy where I used to work who had to look at the keyboard while typing. I merely switched four keys on the keyboard and the resulting e-mails were side-splitting! Hours of fun.)

I noted that Kelby suffered from redundancy several times. For instance, one tip is to use Command-L (open-apple for me, thank you very much) to highlight the entire URL field in Safari. Two pages later, he recommends placing the cursor over the icon beside the URL and clicking. Well, those two could be compiled together I should think.

What makes the book fun, though, is that a surprising amount of tips and tricks can be used all the way back to OS 9.1 (which I use)! For example, users may know about the Shift-Command-3 to take a screen shot. This saves itself as a picture in your hard drive. But I didn't know that Shift-Command-4 allows you to click-and-drag the area to be photographed. Shift-Command-Control-4* saves the image to your clipboard: try it out right now! (*NB - Panther and earlier use Control but, regarding Tiger, Scott Kelby replaces Control with the spacebar, and I can't test this.)

The book was an instant hit for me, and when we upgrade to Tiger in the future, I will be sure to purchase this book as a gift for my mom (who is technical-manual illiterate [I still love you, Mom!]).

Addendum: True to my word, now that my mother is getting an upgrade for Christmas, I have ordered this book from Ammy, a huge savings over the Apple store's price!

For new mac user like me, this book really helps me on learning the mac in a quick way. Lots of informations in this book might be written well and in detail in larger reference book, but the way Scott Kelby wrote it, very simple without all the overinformation regarding simple actions. As he intentionally put it: This book is full of sidebar tips, and nothing else but sidebars materials.

For more advance tricks, ie. changing iPhoto library to external drive, is not addressed in this book.

I highly recommend this book, especially for new users like me. I can't comment yet for experienced mac user.