Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual

One Minute Bottom Line

Overall, "Switching to the Mac" is an excellent book. I found it to be a great reference whenever I couldn’t figure out how to do something the Mac way and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s comfortable with Windows and wants to move to a Macintosh.

Review

Part 1: Welcome to Macintosh
Chapters one through four give you a nice introduction to the Mac itself. Chapter one starts with the most important thing, (where to find the power button on each of the available models) and follows up with the differences between the PC and Mac keyboards.

Chapters two and three familiarize you with the Dock (an application launcher) and how to work with folders, files, windows, icons, and menus. You’ll also learn about two very important applications, the Finder (sort of like Windows Explorer) and Spotlight (a powerful way to find and open files anywhere on your Mac).

Chapter four is a biggie. It starts with the reassuring information that many of the applications you’re used to using under Windows are available for the Mac, and that the documents you create using them on one OS is usable on the other. The bulk of the chapter shows you how to open, switch between, and close applications; how to minimize and restore windows; how to use Expose to see all the currently (non-minimized) open windows, and how to setup and work with up to sixteen virtual desktops.

Chapter four continues with information about the two flavors of applications written for the Mac’s OS X (pronounced Oh Ess Ten) and instructions describing how to install and uninstall them. This is followed by a look at widgets (a kind of utility application intended to be readily available to display information) and instructions showing you how to create a simple one.

Part 2: Moving In
Chapters five through nine are about moving your data (and possibly your applications) from your PC to your Mac.

Chapter five, titled “Eight Ways to Transfer Your Files”, covers the most common ways to get your data moved to the Mac, and how to move it from one document to another once it’s there. In chapter six, you learn how to move your email messages and address book information to the Mac.

Chapter seven helps you find reasonable alternatives to the “most common” Windows applications that aren’t available on the Mac. The funny thing is that most popular Windows programs, including Office, are available in on the Mac. But for those applications that don't have Mac versions, chapter eight shows you multiple ways of running Windows on your Mac; though it doesn’t mention my favorite way, which is to use VirtualBox from Sun.

Chapter nine shows you how to access the hardware you might need. You’ll learn how to find and communicate with printers, fax machines, digital cameras, hard drives, CD/DVD drives (including burning discs), iPod/iPhones (via iTunes), external monitors, keyboards, and mice. The chapter ends with a nice introduction to Apple’s Time Machine, which automatically creating backups of the data on your hard drive and allows you to recover lost files or older versions of files still on your hard drive. It’s like a visual revision control system for your Mac.

Part 3: The Mac Online
Chapters ten through twelve are about showing you many different ways of connecting to the Internet, and how to use Apple’s Mail, Address Book, Safari, and iChat applications.

Chapter ten walks you through the setup needed to connect to the Internet via four common options; broadband, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and dial-up modem. The fun part is that you can set up multiple configurations and specify the order in which they should be used. Next up is a short introduction to .Mac (originally called iTools), which is a subscription service that provides interesting services like iDisk (which lets you store up to 10GB in the cloud), Email (which reminds me a little of gMail), HomePage (which makes it simple to create and publish your own homepage on www.mac.com), Backup (a poor-man’s version of TimeMachine), and iSynch (which synchronizes your calendar and address book to your cellphone).

The chapter ends by showing you a neat timesaver; how to create an Internet Location File, which is a shortcut to bring up a web page, or start an email to a specific person.

Chapter eleven shows you how to use Apple’s Mail and Address Book applications. Mail is Apples equivalent to Outlook Express (though it seems to have a few more features) and Address Book, which is a nifty little contact manager that integrates with Mail and your iPod or iPhone.

In chapter twelve you’ll get familiar with Safari (Apple’s web browser) and iChat, which is an Instant Messaging client that works with the AIM, Jabber, and GoogleTalks networks, and lets you do audio or video chats in addition to the traditional text based ones.
 
Part 4: Putting Down Roots
According to the author, chapters thirteen through sixteen are intended to help you on your way to becoming a Mac power user.

Chapter thirteen walks you through the basics of setting up security on your Mac, beginning with setting up user accounts. Account set up options include various parental controls which let you filter out the profanity in the supplied New Oxford American Dictionary, and attempt to restrict access to adult web sites in Safari. Parental restrictions also include the ability to create a list of pre-approved addresses for the Mail and iChat applications. One neat feature is the ability to set limits on how long and when your kids have access to their accounts. You can even set different limits for weekdays and weekends. Oh, Leopard also makes it easy to quickly switch from one user account to another if you’ve enabled the “fast user switching” option.

If you’re concerned about security then you’ll find the last part of this chapter extremely interesting as it covers the Mac OS X firewall (which protects your Mac from bad guys coming in over a network connection - like the Internet), FireVault (which encrypts the data in your Home folder using AES-128 - the 128-bit version of the encryption standard adopted by the U.S, government), and the Keychain which makes it easier to deal with all the password protected applications you use by remembering the password you enter and filling it in for you the next time you use that app.

Chapter fourteen shows you how to connect to a network (wired or wireless) and how to share files with another Mac or a PC running Windows.

Chapter fifteen walks you through all those icons on the System Preferences window. I recommend spending some time here because there’s a lot of interesting things you can do to make your Mac behave the way you want it to.

Chapter sixteen introduces you to the almost fifty applications that come free with your Mac and live in the Applications and Utilities folders. The Applications folder holds productivity apps like iCal (an application to schedule your time and appointments) and Preview (which lets you read PDFs, faxes, and image files). The Utilities folder contains utilities like Activity Monitor (which shows you what’s going on in your Mac), System Profiles (which shows you what software is installed), and Terminal (which opens a window with a command line so you can access the Mac’s OS directly).

Part 5: Appendices
There are three appendices making up Part five; Installation& Troubleshooting, The “Where’d It Go?” Dictionary, and The Master Mac OS X Secret Keystroke List.

As you probably can guess from the title, Installing & Troubleshooting shows you how to install Leopard on your Mac and provides information on how to handle the most common issues. It also explains what to do when you encounter the Spinning Ball of Death, which is the Mac version of the hour-glass that never changes back to an arrow on Windows.

The “Where’d It Go?” Dictionary is a brief guide that helps Windows savvy people find the Mac equivalent to things like the About box, the DOS prompt, or the eject button on a CD/DVD drive. Reading it can go a long way toward making you more comfortable in this strange new world.

The Master Mac OS X Secret Keystroke List is a listing of all the keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS X Leopard. Many of these (like the ones for cutting, copying and pasting from/to the clipboard) are common to most Mac applications too, but some are special keystrokes used only during start-up, or to tell your Mac to go into sleep mode, or to power down completely.

Learning these keystrokes can make a world of difference in how fast you are at doing things on your Mac. The author recommends posting a copy next to your monitor, and I completely agree.