randomosity

Mac OS X Lion Pocket Guide by Chris Seibold is one of those handly small books that O’Reilly does so well. In this case, we have a con­cise, but thor­ough, look at the key fea­tures and facets of Apple’s latest oper­at­ing sys­tem and how it changes the way in which we inter­act with our Macs. The handy book begins by expor­ing the new fea­tures and then logic­ally looks at how to upgrade, what issues may emerge and a quick over­view of how to bene­fit from the new fea­tures. Cov­er­age is brief, but of value to both novices and exper­i­enced OSX users alike.

Screen­shots abound and are per­tin­ent and well integ­rated. I’ll be hon­est I have never tried using Apple’s auto­mated migra­tion tool, but the cov­er­age in Seibold’s work is so well com­pel­ling that I decided to give the auto­mated route a try and was pleased to dis­cover how well imple­men­ted this tool is.

This is a valu­able guide and I would sug­gest its the sort of thing that Apple should con­sider provid­ing itself — if it were not in the busi­ness of rein­for­cing the notion that you don’t need a manual to use OSX. This is the volume that should be included with every Mac OSX Lion pack­age. The troubleshoot­ing sec­tion alone is well worth the price. It is itself a won­der­fully logical sub­sec­tion and offers easy to fol­low solu­tions to the com­mon prob­lems and even delving into more advanced solu­tions that I wouldn’t have expec­ted (but am cer­tainly pleased to see) in such a slim volume.
The com­pre­hens­ive cov­er­age of the new OS poin­ted out fea­tures I had yet to dis­cover and I found it well worth the time to work through the book from cover to cover. I would highly recom­mend this book for any­one con­sid­er­ing upgrad­ing, about to carry out an upgrade or new to OSX 10.7.