randomosity

Tib­its Publishing’s latest Take Con­trol volume provides a starter to power-user tour of Bare Bones Software’s BBedit. This short volume by Glenn Flesih­man provides a con­cise, focused and well delivered guide to get the most out of BBedit — one of the most mature text edit­ing envir­on­ment avail­able for OSX. The tone is dir­ect, groun­ded in Flesihman’s deep per­sonal exper­i­ence with BBedit, is well illus­trated and tar­geted explor­a­tion of three prin­cipal tasks: work­ing with text, man­aging web­sites and using pro­jects. The logical lay­out of the volume mae­ans it is help­ful as  tutorial to gain imme­di­ate famili­ar­ity with BBedit, but also a solid ref­er­ence source to be con­sul­ted when you need to do some­thing specific.

I have long been a fan of BBedit much as the author of this volume. I have long thought though that I haven’t been using it to its poten­tial. I much appre­ci­ated this book as it gave me new insight on using mark­down, and how to more effect­ively use the very power­ful doc­u­ment com­pare and manip­u­late func­tion­al­ity. The other big win for me is get­ting a bet­ter handle on the ver­sion­ing con­trol that BBedit offers. Fleish­man offers, within a very com­pact and con­cise deliv­ery, a volume packed full of valu­able and imme­di­ately use­ful dir­ec­tion to max­im­ize your use of BBedit.

It’s got all sorts of help­ful tips through­out which have made the Take Con­trol volumes so use­ful. Tasks are clearly iden­ti­fied and step by step dis­cus­sions util­ise a recipe approach to provid­ing instruc­tion in pro­gram fun­da­ment­als. The book cov­ers all the main bases in the pro­gramme and after pro­ceed­ing through it myself with a copy of BBedit open I feel I am far more aware of the more power­ful aspects of BBedit and have a greater sense of how I may be able to use them myself for text manip­u­la­tion. As I men­tioned, I really like the tips provided and all the more so that many are ded­ic­ated to help­ing you work more effi­ciently with the programme.

This is a great book for novices and experts alike and is guar­an­teed to help you get more out of what is a cru­cial pro­gramme in the OSX arsenal.